29 May 2026
Elena Hogg, founder of local culinary company FOOD by Elena, is getting her desserts done and dusted ahead of dinner.
I’ve recently become quite a fan of the dessert-in-a-glass option for serving up puddings. Even the most clumsy assembly looks quasi-chic in a retro-style coupe and topped with some berries or cocoa nibs.
As such, it’s the ultimate in versatility: a busy home-cook’s quick win, or an ambitious dinner party host’s pièce de résistance. In either of these cases, one of the biggest plus-points of a dessert-in-a-glass is that they can almost always be assembled in advance, meaning it’s one job done and dusted nice and early.
Particularly if you’re that dinner party host, wanting to present something elegant to wow your guests at the end of a meal, the make-ahead aspect is invaluable. There’s inevitable chaos trying to get a main course served to six or eight diners – and still hot, ideally.
If dessert is already taken care of, having been made the previous day, then there’s no need for the cook to wolf down their main and abandon the table (again) to go and prep dessert.
Conversations can be finished, as can that glass of wine, even.
Another advantage of this kind of dessert is that it provides a huge safety net: there’s no worrying about a panna cotta or mousse that hasn’t quite set enough to be turned out on a plate and hold its shape. Even the softest of crémeaux will behave beautifully served up in a glass.
For the ultra-ambitious, a layered dessert is the ultimate in showing off: that moment as you bring out a tray of mathematically perfect layers to oohs and aahs from your friends and tell them, “Oh, this was no bother…” THAT moment makes layered desserts worth the effort.
And in truth, the effort is not about difficulty as much as making enough time, because usually each layer needs to set before the next one is added. Plan ahead and the world’s your oyster – though somehow I always end up cutting it fine no matter what I do, so I’m very much a work-in-progress in that regard.
In fact, I regularly make a dessert based on white and a dark chocolate ganaches, separated by a layer of lime jelly, which provides some zing to cut through all the rich chocolate.
Inevitably, that top strarum of dark ganache is still slightly too warm to be layered onto the jelly without risk of it dissolving slightly, but I’ve learnt to accept that these panicked moments are just par for the course. If I’m not slightly ruffled, I probably haven’t aimed high enough.
The kind of vessel you choose for your dessert can have a big impact. A wine glass or coupe will score highly on the refinement scale, while a tumbler is more robust and less likely to topple over. A shot glass is brilliant for those intense desserts like 85 per cent dark chocolate pots, or sharp rhubarb compotes, which would both be too much in greater quantities.
I have little see-through glass espresso cups for just this kind of offering, and also some rather lovely baby mugs from the Le Creuset range, which are the perfect in-between size: not as small as an espresso cup or shot glass, but not as big as a tumbler. (Le Creuset calls them espresso cups, but I’ve been brought up with an Italian extended family that’s militant about espresso never comprising more than thirty millilitres of liquid, so these mini-mugs don’t pass muster for espresso.)
A china teacup is the perfect vessel for delicate desserts like an Earl Grey custard with orange zest shortbread – you can usually find a set of six delightfully chintzy ones at your local charity shop.
Be careful if you’re choosing to serve your dessert in wine glasses, because anything long-stemmed tends to be too tall for most diners, and forces them to crane their necks to peer over the rim and see what they’re eating, much like a child at the grown-up table. Champagne flutes indeed are a no-no, for the same reason, and also because it’s deeply frustrating when your spoon can’t fit down the bottom end to scoop out the last mouthful.
Moving away from all things fancy, though, desserts-in-a-glass can be practical and pragmatic, too. Don’t have time to let your cheesecake set in a tin? Crumble the base into the bottom of a tumbler, dollop in the cream cheese mixture, bang it on the kitchen surface a little so it sinks into the glass, then pile some berries on top. Delicious cheesecake with none of the stressful unmolding and slicing.
How about your favourite mug filled with left-over brownie crumbled amid small scoops of ice cream? Squeeze in some pockets of store-bought caramel sauce and this makes an excellent Friday night treat – especially if you let the kids have at it with the cake decorations to layer up their own with sprinkles, fudge pieces and chocolate chips. Good luck getting them to bed, though.
