The World's Best
Desserts & Sweets

Pudding is the course a country saves its best tricks for. Every cuisine keeps one — the pastry it folds by hand, the syrup it swears by, the cake that means a wedding — and 2,151 of them make the ranking, from 154 countries. They run from the custard tarts of Iberia to the honeyed pastries of the Levant and the ice creams of Italy, and no other department on the site comes anywhere near as large.

The surprise is who leads. Italy has by far the deepest bench, 305 ranked sweets from gelato down, yet the single best-rated is Algeria's makroud el louse, trailed by Bulgaria's Torta Garash and Portugal's pastel de nata. Fame runs on its own sugar rush: the most-reviewed are tiramisù, baklava and the French croissant, while the macaron, for all its renown, sits far down the list.