The 10 Chocolate Desserts Our Readers Loved Most in 2025

Reader-favorite chocolate desserts that deliver big payoff with minimal effort—just in time for the holidays.

By
Leah Colins
A studio portrait of editor Leah Colins.
Leah Colins
Senior Culinary Editor

Leah is the Senior Culinary Editor at Serious Eats, and was previously a recipe developer and editor with America's Test Kitchen for almost 9 years. She has developed recipes for and edited over 20 cookbooks ranging in topic from bread baking to plant-based eating to outdoor grilling and so much more. While there, she also developed recipes and articles for Cooks Illustrated Magazine, Cooks Country Magazine, and ATK's digital platform.Before her life as a recipe developer, she cooked in 5-star and Michelin-starred fine dining establishments from coast to coast such as The Herbfarm and Aubergine Restaurant at L'Auberge Carmel; she also treasures her time flipping burgers on flattops in her teenage years, and baking and boxing cookies and pies at a wonderful family-owned German bakery in her early professional life.

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Published December 22, 2025
Spoon of mug cake

Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez

December has a way of turning even the most disciplined cooks into chocolate maximalists. When the days are short and the calendar is full of holiday festivities, dessert stops being optional. And judging by what Serious Eats readers have been saving all year on MyRecipes—our free tool for bookmarking and organizing your favorite recipes—chocolate is a clear favorite.

These are the chocolate desserts you kept coming back to in 2025: rich, deeply satisfying, and ideally suited to the holiday season. If you're looking for a last-minute dessert idea or just an excuse to melt some chocolate before the year's end, you're in the right place.

Love these recipes? With MyRecipes, your personal home for recipes, easily save and organize your favorites, plus thousands more, in one convenient place.

  • Molten Chocolate Mug Cake

    Spoon of mug cake

    Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez

    When you want cake, but your patience (and willingness to preheat an oven) is nowhere to be found, this molten chocolate mug cake delivers. Stir a handful of pantry staples right in a mug, microwave for a few minutes, and you're rewarded with a warm, gooey, single-serving chocolate cake—no mixer, no pans, no sharing required.

  • No-Bake Fudgy Chocolate Squares

    A plate of layered chocolate squares with a fudgy and textured appearance topped with sea salt

    Serious Eats / Morgan Hunt Glaze

    Another low-effort, high-reward chocolate dessert—are you sensing a theme here? These no-bake fudgy chocolate squares deliver big payoff with minimal work and zero oven time, combining bittersweet chocolate filling with a crisp cookie crust. They fall somewhere between brownies, fudge, and mousse, and come together with about 20 minutes of active prep, making them ideal for last-minute dessert situations.

  • Buckeye Brownies

    Buckeye Brownies with sea salt garnish, cut into pieces on a blue dish, with blue cups and small white plates

    Serious Eats / Morgan Hunt Glaze

    If you believe chocolate and peanut butter are at their best when layered aggressively, these buckeye brownies are for you. A deeply fudgy brownie base gets topped with a creamy, salty-sweet peanut butter layer, then finished with a glossy blanket of dark chocolate ganache. Inspired by the classic Ohio candy, they're unapologetically rich, nostalgic, and exactly the kind of dessert that disappears fast at holiday gatherings.

  • Levain Bakery-Style Super-Thick Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe

    20190131-levain-style-chocolate-chip-cookies-vicky-wasik-19
    Vicky Wasik

    These Levain-style chocolate chip cookies are all about unapologetic thickness: towering, barely spread, and packed with melty chocolate in every bite. Instead of relying on gimmicky ingredients, this recipe gets there by rebalancing the dough itself—specifically by dialing back the sugar to control spread. They're a bakery-style cookie that's crisp at the edges, soft and gooey inside, and substantial enough to feel like a proper dessert.

    Continue to 5 of 10 below

  • 4-Ingredient Chocolate Crinkle Cookies

    Chocolate crinkle cookies arranged on a red surface

    Serious Eats / Robby Lozano, Food Stylist: Julia Levy, Prop Stylist: Josh Hoggle

    If brownies ever decided to get dressed up for the holidays, they'd turn into these chocolate crinkle cookies. Snow-dusted with confectioners' sugar and rich with chocolate, they're dense and chewy inside with that signature crackled crust. Plus, by starting with boxed brownie mix, this four-ingredient recipe delivers maximum payoff with minimal fuss.

  • S'mores Brownies

    A slice of brownie topped with toasted marshmallows on a plate surrounded by mini marshmallows

    Serious Eats / Niedle Creative

    These s'mores brownies take everything you love about the campfire classic and turn it into a rich, sliceable dessert. A sweet graham cracker crust supports a rich chocolate brownie layer, all topped with broiled marshmallows that melt into gooey perfection.

  • The Food Lab's Chocolate Chip Cookies

    20131213-chocolate-chip-cookies-food-lab-55-edit.jpg
    J. Kenji López-Alt

    These are classic chocolate chip cookies, leveled up. Brown butter adds a deep, toasty flavor, while chopped chocolate creates pockets of meltiness throughout the dough instead of uniform chips.

  • Sweet and Salty Puppy Chow Recipe (Chocolate Peanut Butter Snack Mix)

    A bowl of powdered sugarcoated snack mix on a textured surface

    Serious Eats / Stacy Allen

    If your first encounter with "puppy chow" involved a brief moment of concern—same. This Midwestern classic is actually one of the easiest, most joyful sweet-and-salty snacks around: crisp cereal coated in chocolate and peanut butter, then buried under a blizzard of powdered sugar. This grown-up version adds brown butter for nuttiness, white miso paste for salty balance, and a hint of cayenne for gentle heat.

    Continue to 9 of 10 below

  • Chocolate Peanut Butter Cheesecake Bars

    Chocolate peanut butter cheesecake bars garnished with peanuts arranged on a serving plate

    Serious Eats / Robby Lozano, Food Stylist: Tricia Manzanero, Prop Stylist: Keoshia McGhee

    If a peanut butter cup and a cheesecake had a summer fling, these bars would be their perfect love child. Rich but fluffy, intensely peanut buttery yet refreshingly cool, with a buttery Oreo crust, and a silky chocolate ganache topping, it's a dessert that will make people stop mid-bite and ask for the recipe.

  • Chocolate Pot de Crèmes

    Overhead view of pot de cremes

    Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez

    Chocolate pots de crèmes are proof that an elegant dessert doesn't have to be complicated. These rich, velvety French custards come together easily on a weeknight, yet feel luxurious enough for a special occasion.

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