Knowledge Base > Fran Costigan - New Year's Jumpstart
Fran Costigan - New Year's Jumpstart
This event was on
Tuesday, January 06, 2026 at 1:00 pm Pacific, 4:00 pm Eastern
Start 2026 on a sweet note. Join Chef Fran Costigan, Rouxbe Director of Vegan Pastry for a January deep-dive into the essential building blocks of vegan desserts. She’ll explore the … Read More.
Question:
My wife and I have a sweet tooth but we are trying to eat more healthy this year. Can you recommend a few tasty but very healthy deserts that are beginner level to make?
— Robert Kerr
Answer:
I think baked apples stuffed with dried fruit and nuts is a wonderful sweet treat. Something that I enjoy very much and it's certainly is what we would say is on the healthy spectrum. Poached pears and agar fruit soup and some, and those are all super simple to make right. You you just core an apple, take a little bit of the skin off around the front, the top and then stuff, a bunch of your favorite dried fruits and nuts in there. A little bit of maple syrup maybe, maybe. And just bake them until they're nice and soft and you can poach pears in a nice syrup or some juice, uh, and have a lovely dessert and fill out the plate with more. Now I like to have a small cookie or a, you know, a small chocolate truffle for example. Chef Char still teases me about the very first time that we met, which was quite a long time ago. And I brought some truffles to give to her and she said, what are those? They're so little. So here's the thing Robert and everyone else who's interested in this is you can have a piece of chocolate, you can have a small piece of cake that's made healthfully, but small is the word.