25 Greatest Desserts of All Time

For many of us, dessert is the best part of any meal. There are hundreds of sweet pastries, concoctions and recipes to satisfy your sweet tooth, yet there are some that are more popular and beloved than others.

We took a look at hundreds of desserts from around the world and sought out those with the most love on social media, particularly Instagram, to see which desserts we cannot get enough of. From eclairs and baklava to apple pie and macarons — can you guess which dessert is tops?

More commonly known as the Belgian waffle in English, this gift from Brussels was never meant to be a breakfast item. Instead, the street food’s squares were meant to hold toppings and serve as a sweetened plate of sorts!

Whether you like it filled with syrup and fruits in the morning or covered in powdered sugar and chocolate as a treat, one thing is clear: Everyone loves a good Belgian waffle.

When you create a delicious vanilla cake savored throughout Latin America, you want to claim your invention. That is why so many Latin Americans debate over which country actually came up with this staple dessert, soaked in three different kinds of milk — evaporated, sweetened condensed, and whole milk or heavy cream.

We’ll let them duke it out while we have another slice.

An Italian pudding, panna cotta is actually attributed to a Hungarian woman who created it while living in Italy at the start of the 20th century. 

The “cooked cream” and gelatin dessert found its way into cookbooks by the 1960s, and it’s grown into a worldwide favorite ever since.

Dining at an Italian restaurant and not having a cannoli for dessert is a sacrilege.

This tube-shaped fried dough filled with creamy ricotta cheese sweetened with marsala wine is a classic and has been since Sicily began serving it during Carnivale around the first century.