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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.