12 Fun and Fancy Desserts From Pastry Legend Claudia Fleming

From 1994 to 2002, Claudia Fleming was the architect behind the desserts coming out of Gramercy Tavern’s kitchen in New York City. With every cake, cookie, and tart, Fleming unwittingly changed how America perceived the last course of an elegant meal. “Her desserts were stylish, not stylized,” explains Celia Sacks of San Francisco’s Omnivore Books. They had an element of approachability and fun rarely found at fine-dining restaurants at the time. Fleming leaned into seasonality in baking, topping her buttermilk panna cotta, for example, with various fruit gelées, and her now-famous chocolate caramel tart flecked with sea salt ushered in a permanent era of sweet-and-salty pairings.

She shared her signature recipes in her seminal cookbook, The Last Course, which was released just a month after 9/11 and wasn’t an immediate bestseller. But after it went out of print, the book resurfaced as a cult classic, with some used copies going for as high as $200 on eBay, according to the Washington Post. This resurgence led Penguin Random House to reissue the book in 2019, eighteen years after it first hit the shelves.

Since Gramercy Tavern, The Last Course, and the untimely passing of her husband, chef Gerry Hayden, Fleming found clarity in baking at home. She spent all of 2020 mining the seasons and family memories for inspiration to create new recipes and reinvent old ones, all of which now live on the pages of her 2022 cookbook Delectable. Here, we’ve brought together a collection of a few of her greatest hits, including three desserts from her latest, several classics from The Last Course, and a number of originals she contributed to Epicurious and Bon Appétit over the years.