The World's Healthiest Dessert Recipes (Seconds Allowed!)

Healthy and dessert in the same sentence? You read right! We know this time of year can be rather, well, indulgent...but indulging yourself doesn’t have to come at a cost! We’ve gathered together some of our favorite dessert recipes, that are as healthy as they are finger-lickin’ delicious. From vegan and gluten free to sweet treats packed with superfoods and sprinklings of olive oil (...of course!), we’re sure you’ll be coming back for seconds. And the beauty of that? Seconds are okay! In fact, we’d even recommend thirds. Sweet tooths, ready to start your new year’s resolution early this year?

1. Creamy Banana Ice Cream

If you’re anything like us, you need your weekly (or daily) dose of ice cream. This vegan and gluten free soft serve banana ice cream could not be more simple to make. I mean, it only requires 1 ingredient! All you need as a base are a couple of frozen bananas to blend together. Once blended, the frozen banana turns into a creamy, naturally sweet icey treat. Now that you have your base, this is where your creativity kicks in. Add into the blender dark chocolate chips, a scoop of pure cocoa, a dollop of peanut butter, or chopped walnuts and molasses like our inspiration recipe suggests. The beauty of this recipe is that anything goes! Even a drizzle of olive oil on top for some extra healthy decadence. The banana is the blank canvas and you are the artist.

Original recipe inspired by Simple Vegan Blog 

2. Salted Dark Chocolate Olive Oil Cookies

These are everything we could ever ask for in a cookie - sweet n’ salty, oozing with dark chocolate chunks, and chewy on the inside and crisp on the outside. The secret to these cookies unique flavor and perfect chewy-meets-crispy consistency is the high quality olive oil, which serves as a healthy substitute for butter (that’s right, there’s no butter in these bad boys!). For the best outcome, use the best ingredients: 70% or above cocoa dark chocolate, flakey sea salt and La Española Olive Oil.

Original recipe inspired by Life as a Strawberry 

3. Stuffed Baked Cinnamon Apples 

This is a cold weather classic. It’s as easy as can be, gluten free, and warms you up from the inside out! All you need to do is scoop out the core of an apple and fill it with the ingredients that tickle your fancy. Our inspiration recipe calls for a mixture of brown sugar, cinnamon, walnuts and butter, but we love to throw in some tart cranberries to the mix, and top it off with a sprinkle of olive oil for an extra crispy outside (or for an even healthier vegan option, you can substitute the butter out altogether for olive oil). Once they’ve baked to a golden crisp, we recommend some greek yogurt ice cream to top it off. :D

Original recipe inspired by Tastes Better from Scratch

4. Sweet Potato Fudge Brownies 

In what kind of magical world are decadent fudge brownies synonymous with veggies?? THIS ONE. And we swear, the kids will have no idea! As you can probably guess from the name, the star ingredients of these vegan to-die-for chocolatey squares of heaven is sweet potato, which makes for a naturally sweet and moist base. With the main ingredients of sweet potato puree, peanut or almond butter, cocoa powder and the flour of your choosing, they’re low in calories, high in protein, packed with iron, and spoon-licking good. 

Original recipe inspired by Chocolate Covered Katie

5. Paleo Pecan Pie

No holiday-time dessert list would be complete without a pecan pie...but this isn’t your run-of-the-mill pecan pie. Oh no. It’s a paleo pecan pie, meaning it’s made with 100% whole, unprocessed ingredients. Caveman approved. Instead of using the traditional Karo corn syrup, the sweet, caramelized flavor and chewy consistency comes from blend of pure maple syrup and date paste. 

Original recipe inspired by The Healthy Foodie

Which of these healthy dessert recipes will you be devouring first?!