15 Irresistible Tips for Creating the Ultimate Dessert Pizza

Mamma mia, there’s nothing like pizza. I wish you could have it for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert. Well … technically, you can. Breakfast pizza is a brunch-time hit, complete with eggs, bacon, and cheese. Lunch and dinner welcome a standard savory pizza, fixed with just about any veggie or meat you could dream of. But I must say, dessert pizza takes the cake. If you’ve never heard of it, this is your opportunity to flex those creative culinary muscles. 

I can’t lie, the process of making a dessert pizza triggers a child-like excitement similar to gingerbread house building or loading up at a sundae bar. However, like any recipe, dessert pizza can vary quite a bit, anywhere from a discombobulated sugar tornado to a sophisticated delicacy deemed a masterpiece. Follow these 15 sweet tricks for the absolute best dessert pizza.

Like any pizza, you’ll want to follow a standard protocol. Of course, a little sparkle of creativity never hurts, but the basic formula involves a crust, sauce or spread, and toppings. Cheese can also be incorporated into the mix. However, the most important part of making dessert pizza is creating a cohesive mixture of flavors and textures. As a chef and recipe designer, I am always deeply intrigued by bold and unique flavor combinations. It’s time you dive in and get a slice of the action.

So, you’ve decided that you knead dessert pizza in your life. The first thing you’ll want to do is pick a direction. To create a cohesive dessert, consider choosing a theme. Do you want to set off on a double chocolate crusade, or a grilled fruit feat? If you’re lost, think about sweet treats that you enjoy, like Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Heck, why do all the work yourself when they hire professional food scientists called “Flavor Gurus” to come up with top-tier flavor combinations?

If you’re a fan of Cherry Garcia, consider a dessert pizza with a mascarpone or cream cheese base, topped with chocolate chips and dried or sliced tart cherries. Love Chunky Monkey? Use melted chocolate, sliced bananas, crumbled walnuts, and cashew butter. Do you have more of a Chubby Hubby kinda sweet tooth? Break out the pretzels, caramel, peanut butter, and fudge. No need to start from scratch when you already know what you love.

Any unflavored pizza dough crust can do the trick. You could use a variety of bases like fried dough, phyllo, or even one made with graham cracker dust. My favorite pizza crust to pair with dessert toppings is sourdough. Not only is it simple and inexpensive to make from scratch, but it has a tangy and subtly sour flavor that helps to balance the sweetness of all those sugar-laden ingredients.

Sourdough is, in my opinion, the best yeast alternative for pizza dough. You will need sourdough starter, whether you make it yourself or are gifted an established starter from a friend. Sourdough rises beautifully and is made with fermented flour and water, which gives it that tart flavor, not dissimilar from yogurt or kombucha. It’s loaded with probiotics, which may help to promote balance in your gut microbiome. This can help your gut process all that sugar on the pizza. But best of all, sourdough will give your dessert pizza a unique and flavorful boost that your typical pizza crust just doesn’t have.

Depending on your level of experimentation in the pizza department, you may have discovered the importance of garnishing your pizza with a drizzle. Perhaps you use balsamic reduction, barbecue sauce, or even just extra virgin olive oil on your savory pizzas. Well, sweet pizzas deserve just as much love. Consider a sweet drizzle to finish your creation. Luckily, there are endless options to choose from. 

A standard classic would be a drizzle of melted white, dark, or milk chocolate. This would pair well with just about any dessert pizza out there. Melt chocolate bars for easy drizzling. Honey, maple syrup, and agave help enhance the natural sweetness of a fruit-based dessert pizza. Pomegranate balsamic or blueberry syrup can add a fruity punch. Melted butter, especially salted, can work well with a cooked fruit pizza, helping it to taste like pie. Extra virgin olive oil or balsamic reduction works on fresh or frozen fruit pizza. A high-quality EVOO can mellow the sweetness while adding a fatty mouthfeel, and balsamic gives it an acidic kick to round out the flavors. Try cajeta caramel sauce for something unique, or simply buy a jar of hot fudge and go to town.

Have you ever made grilled pizza? For me, grilled pizza is flooded with memories of family cookouts and make-your-own pies. The only thing missing was sugar. Well, it’s time to start a tradition of your own. Making pizza on the grill is fun, flavorful, and helps you soak up some extra rays. You’ll need to grill the flattened dough over the flame. Flip it to ensure both sides are thoroughly cooked. This will give you a solid surface to work with, so those toppings don’t fall through the hot grates. If you’re using any fruit or items you’d like to cook rather than just heat or melt, consider grilling them separately before adding them to the crust, just like you’d pre-cook meat or veggies for a grilled pizza. If you haven’t tried it before, just know that grilled fruit is phenomenal.

There are lots of tips and tricks for grilling fruit, but the first is that it’s very important how you slice it. Again, we don’t want any lost soldiers, so use large chunks or consider spearing them. Grilling your crust is a great technique if you’re making a fresh pizza that just requires the crust to be cooked. If you want to go hotter, remember that you can always melt chocolate or marshmallows on the crust by shutting the grill top to trap in heat. Keep a close eye on your pie, because sugar burns and flames can be unpredictable.

Just like you might drizzle your savory pizza with a high-quality extra virgin olive oil to add a fatty mouthfeel and density, you can use melted butter to achieve a similar effect with your dessert pizza pie. This is an especially important trick if you’re choosing to forgo any cheese or other fatty topping. First, choose your butter depending on the flavor you’re hoping to achieve. I enjoy grass-fed butter because it’s typically creamier and has herbal undertones. You can rub the stick right onto the cooked crust if you’re pre-cooking the dough, or melt the butter first and then drizzle it on for an even distribution.

I personally love brown butter. Brown butter has a subtle toffee flavor that suggests sweetness. Yes, it’s an extra step compared to regular melted butter, but it pairs incredibly well with any banana, stone fruit, vanilla, or caramel flavors included in your sauces or toppings.

You should be sprinkling your pizza pie with spices, but it’s equally as important to add them right into the crust. You can knead in typical dessert spices like cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, or even cocoa powder. Imagine a chocolate cinnamon crust for your s’mores dessert pizza, or a cardamom crust for your grilled peach and vanilla bean dessert pizza.

Heck, venture a bit further from your standard dessert spices and use unexpected seasonings for desserts like black pepper, chipotle, tamarind, or thyme. Just be sure you’re confident in your pairings if you’re going to take a bold direction. When adding spice to the crust, go heavy. Pizza crust is fairly mellow, so taking advantage of adding spice wherever you can will help that pizza go from basic to top tier. When in doubt, add cinnamon or vanilla, as they go with most sweet flavorings and are universally loved by both adults and children.

Desperate for dessert … like, right now? Yes, you could make your own sourdough crust from the starter you’ve been babying for months. Or you could grab some yeast and make a standard crust, waiting around for it to rise. But if you’re ready to get munching, consider using a standard tortilla to hack an instant dessert pizza without the dough.

The trick here is to pre-toast your tortilla enough so it doesn’t get soggy if you plan to add any sauce or watery fruit. You’ll also need to pre-cook it if you’re going to add all fresh, uncooked ingredients like yogurt and fresh fruit. Tortillas are thin, so this will help them to keep their structure. Double-check that you’re using an unflavored tortilla, because garlic and sun-dried tomato don’t pair well with chocolate and marshmallow fluff. Try toasting your oversized tortilla in a cast iron skillet, and let the edges fold up slightly to hold in all of those sugary sweet toppings. Heat that pan first to ensure a crispy tortilla crust.

My favorite thing about savory pizzas is the cheese, and I think most people can agree. Luckily, cheese can be used in both a sweet and savory capacity. If you’re still trying to make sense of the combo, think charcuterie board. To play it safe, you can pair cream cheese, mascarpone, or ricotta with just about any chocolate or fruit. Cream cheese works well with cinnamon bun-style dessert pizzas or anything cakey.

If you want to go with a more dramatic pairing, consider sharp Vermont cheddar, blue cheese, gouda, Manchego, or goat cheese with fruit. The key here is to make sure that the cheese is just an accent to the fruit and other sweet ingredients. Add honey, chocolate, maple syrup, and brown sugar to ensure that your pizza isn’t wandering too far into savory territory. Do a little research about the best fruit and cheese pairings, and the absolute best cheese and chocolate pairings before you dive in.

Nuts have always made well-needed appearances in the dessert arena. They help to mellow the sugars while adding little pockets of fat. Even if you’re not a walnuts-in-my-brownies kind of person, you should still consider adding nuts, or even candied nuts, as a pizza topping. For a chocolate pizza, consider toasted hazelnuts or walnuts. For stone fruit, choose slivered almonds, pistachios, and cashews. For citrus, turn to pine nuts. And when it comes to caramel, there is no nut greater than pecans.

You should be using nuts on both savory and sweet pizzas. They add varied texture to the pies, which gives the mouth a break and excites the taste buds. A distribution of varied textures is often missing from recipes, especially desserts that tend to be bready or soft. A little crunch can go a long way. If you’re not planning on baking your toppings right onto your pizza, consider toasting the nuts before adding them. Even a few seconds in a hot pan can bring out the flavor in a pleasing way.

Although we often think of pizza as hot, it’s not the only option. Even in the savory world, we top pizzas with fresh arugula. In the sweet world, the same rules apply. Mixing hot and cold ingredients adds variety to your mouthfeel, kind of like a hot fudge sundae, or enjoying a scoop of ice cream on your blueberry pie.

The most predictable way to mix hot and cold ingredients is by adding ice cream, the ultimate frozen treat. But there are other cold ingredients that could make an appearance as well. Frozen chopped fruit, sorbet, and even frozen candies are all winners. Be sure to add the frozen ingredients after everything else comes out of the oven. I would recommend adding anything that is frozen to your slice of pizza as you serve it, instead of to the whole hot pizza pie. It will melt or soften quickly, so it’s best that it doesn’t sit too long before consumption. If you want to get really fancy, you could top your pizza with deep-fried ice cream, and just keep layering on the temperature contrasts.

Just because you bake the crust doesn’t mean you can’t use fresh toppings. My mother used to make a breakfast pizza that was entirely uncooked except for the crust. It was loaded with cream cheese and blueberries, and some other magical ingredient. I still think about it sometimes. Start by fully cooking your crust in the oven or on the grill. Once it’s cooked and cooled, layer on those uncooked toppings.

Uncooked toppings could include cheese, fruits, shaved chocolate, yogurt, nuts, syrups — any unbaked item that you’d consider eating with your dessert. The key here is if you’re going with a fruit-based dessert pizza, pick the freshest fruit possible. Fresh fruit dessert pizza can end up tasting like fruit salad on bread if you don’t strategize and come up with a theme or direction, or if you use dingy fruit. Don’t use more than three fruits, and you’ll want to avoid any watery fruits like watermelon or cantaloupe. Berries and stone fruit work best.

Marinara is typically the saucy star of savory pies, but when it comes to dessert, you’ll want to find an equally saucy equivalent. I like to think of this layer, just above the crust, as adding both texture and flavor to the pizza. For a sweet pizza, this layer usually comes in the form of a spread. You can use soft cheese that will melt when baked. Melted chocolate pizza is a classic too, with an equally rich mouthfeel. My personal favorite is nut butter. Peanut butter goes with any dessert in my book, but you could take it up a notch with almond butter or cashew butter.

Nutella will tickle just about anyone’s fancy, and marshmallow fluff can help those toppings stay stuck. Jam and jelly are intensely sweet and can pair well with peanut butter, fruit, and even chocolate. It’s the perfect spread for a breakfast fruit pizza, but if that’s too sweet for your tastebuds, consider some cream cheese instead.

Instead of a classic pizza dough crust, consider an alternative that will have your dessert pizza tasting more like a pastry. To get the ultimate flaky, buttery texture, use phyllo dough for your sheet pan pizza crust. Folks do this for savory pizzas, too, but I think it’s the ultimate sweet trick for the absolute best dessert pizza.

It’s your excuse to use a pre-made crust (unless you are one of the few skilled people who can actually make, and have the patience to make, their own homemade phyllo dough). For the rest of us mere mortals, head to the frozen dessert aisle and get your hands on some dough, pile on the toppings, and bake. Be sure to monitor your pizza closely as phyllo has a tendency to burn because of its thin layers. Use phyllo dough as the crust for any category of dessert pizza.

Most fans of crisps are really just there for that crispy, crumbly topping. Butter, sugar, salt, and flour are all you need to create that melt-in-your-mouth goodness. Well, let’s not limit ourselves to only enjoying that crumble when we have crisp or coffee cake. Make it next time you decide to serve dessert pizza.

This crumble classically pairs well with cooked fruit, but could be just as welcome on a cinnamon-bun style pizza, or even a s’mores pizza. For a s’mores-style pizza, consider using pulverized graham crackers instead of flour and adding some additional cinnamon. Use a classic crisp recipe to get started, and sprinkle that crumble on your pizza generously. This works well paired with water-dense toppings like fruit, or a pizza with a lot of “sauce” or spread. Keep in mind that the pizza crust is already relatively bready, so adding those water-dense toppings helps to create balance, especially with additional bready crumble on top.

Now, even if you’re not a peanut-butter-on-your-brownies kind of person, hear me out. Almost everyone loves ultra-sweet desserts. But adding just a drizzle of nut butter can make your sweet treat so much richer and give it serious depth. Nut butter helps to balance those intense sugars, making it a smoother dining experience. Now, it’s time to choose which nut butter is right for you.

There are many options to choose from, with combinations and exotic nuts from all over the world. I enjoy peanut butter and tahini, but hazelnut butter and almond butter deliver a more robust flavor. If your nut butter is too thick, heat it, or thin it out with a little milk or neutral oil. Drizzle it generously on your dessert pizza, no matter if it is chocolate-heavy or fruit-heavy or anything in between. If you’re using milder flavors, go with a cashew butter or raw nut butter. Tahini is one of my favorites across the board, although not technically made from nuts, as it isn’t overpowering but can be extremely creamy.