49 Best Fall Recipes, Ranked

These cookies have the same warmth and sugar-coated charm as the classic (as well as the familiar soft-yet-chewy texture), but with a fall flair. Boiled cider and apple pie spices make these ultra-autumnal. These cookies are #49 on our list, but they might be the first ones to disappear from a cookie plate. 

Pumpkin pie is quintessentially fall, but be honest — you're probably only making it for Thanksgiving. These bars take everything you love about this classic pie — the smooth, custardy filling, the punchy autumnal spices — and transforms it into a handheld treat that can be an afternoon snack, a celebratory dessert for a crowd, or just a quick way to satisfy your pumpkin cravings. 

Filled with chives, bacon, cheddar, and sour cream, these super-soft potato rolls bring everything you love about a loaded baked potato into a luxe dinner roll. If you're looking for a side dish to steal the show, this is it.

Small but mighty, these pretzel bites pack a major (and very nostalgic) punch. Just like the famous mall pretzels, these bites are drenched in butter then plunged into salt-spiked cinnamon sugar. Each bite delivers maximum fall spice. 

Don't wait until Thanksgiving to get your sweet potato casserole fix. Instead, reimagine the casserole as a proper dessert, complete with a tender spiced cake and swoops of torched meringue.

This easy, one-bowl recipe uses an aromatic spiced tea to make fragrant bars, which are then coated in a thin layer of espresso glaze. The result is a pan of soft, chewy bars that mimic a cozy chai latte — with a shot of espresso added for good measure. 

This cinnamon roll focaccia has a crunchy brown sugar topping, a generous amount of sweet glaze, and, of course, lots of cinnamon filling. And because it’s based on our 2025 Recipe of the Year, Big and Bubbly Focaccia, the bread itself is tender, fluffy, and flavorful.

With a rich, buttery texture and an almost marzipan-like chew, this simple cake, made with a combination of almond and all-purpose flours, and scented with almond extract, is incredibly flavorful. Studded with fragrant cubes of ripe pear, it's an excellent afternoon snacking cake or an enticing after-dinner dessert. 

Tender, soft, and slightly sweet, these spiral-shaped challahs make a gorgeous centerpiece on a Rosh Hashanah table. This recipe makes two loaves, which is perfect — serve one with dinner, and save the second for for French toast or bread pudding.

Skip the store-bought stuff — the best, most autumnal gnocchi is made with seasonal sweet potatoes, eggs, flour, and not much else. Serve with brown butter and sage and you have a meal so cozy, it may mean you never want to leave your house again. 

Don't wait until Thanksgiving to make cornbread: This version leans slightly sweet, thanks to the addition of maple syrup, but it's still a good match for a bowl of chili or stew. Pro tip: Lean into its sweetness and spread it with butter and an extra drizzle of syrup.

It's harvest season, and that calls for a hearty, seeded bread to accompany bowls of soup and baked casseroles. Shaped like a sheaf of wheat and coated in a sunflower seed coating, this lightly spiced loaf also glows golden thanks to the pumpkin purée mixed into the dough. 

Not only are these small-batch apple tarts easier to make than apple pie (you only need one apple!), but their low profile means more flaky, buttery pastry in every bite. Each tart hides a layer of grated apple beneath the sliced fruit, which becomes jammy and concentrated after baking.

Yes, we Vermonters know that maple season is technically in the spring, but maple is also a quintessential fall flavor. Here, it's combined with walnuts and swirled into a gorgeous, ultra-soft milk bread loaf that's surprisingly simple to make. Toast the stunning slices and slather with maple cream for the ultimate autumn snack.

"A scone is a crisp combination of butter, tenderness, and crunch," says recipe creator Martin Philip. These scones embody all of those characteristics; the bits of candied ginger and chai-inspired spice blend dress them up for fall.

Haven't touched your jar of yeast all summer? Slowly re-enter bread baking season with this easy, ultra-flavorful flatbread. The cottage cheese-based dough comes together in a matter of seconds in a food processor, and the generous addition of chili crisp and herbs makes them an irresistable addition to any meal. 

Embrace the season and have your PSL in every form — cookie bars included. These soft and chewy bars are essentially pumpkin-flavored (and generously spiced) blondies with an espresso glaze. And they're so simple: you mix everything in a single saucepan for easy prep and cleanup. 

While we'd never call classic apple pie boring, we do think that this sourdough iteration is a welcome twist on the original. The sourdough discard in the crust and crumble adds a subtle tang that complements the natural acidity of the fruit. Move over, bread, we’ve got a new use for starter.

Make this bread to begin your week and you'll have breakfast sorted. Packed with harvest fruits — dried apricots, pears, and cranberries — and nuts like pecans and walnuts, this hearty loaf makes the toast of your dreams.

Inspired by Belgian Liège waffles, these orange-hued waffles are light and fluffy and feature pockets of crispy, crackly pearl sugar throughout. Because they're yeasted, plan to mix them the night before and pour into the waffle maker first thing in the morning — right before a weekend excursion to the pumpkin patch.

This pan-fried Indian flatbread is crispy on the exterior, with a potato filling that’s spiced with cilantro, minced fresh green chiles, chili powder, and chaat masala. Stock your freezer with a stack of these for comfort food in an instant. 

Cranberries are not just for Thanksgiving. A twist on our 2023 Recipe of the Year, this reverse-creamed coffee cake is studded with chopped cranberries and scented with a dash of almond extract. The crumbly topping features almonds for crunch, and the sweet glaze is stained pink from even more cranberries.

Recipe creator Martin Philip boldly declares that if he could only eat one type of bread, it would be this miche. Try it and you may just agree: It has a touch of honey and a dose of dark beer that gives it a wonderful complexity. 

If you're looking for a great version of classic pumpkin pie, this isn't it (try this recipe instead). But if you want to try a new take on an old standby,  this no-bake version is what you're looking for. The mousse-like filling is light as a cloud (so you can easily eat more than one slice) and the Biscoff cookie crust adds the perfect note of spice.

A warmly spiced filling of cinnamon, apple, and crunchy nuts get rolled into enriched dough, twisted, then baked. This stunning bread is as welcome on the breakfast table as it is for dessert — and made even better toasted and topped with ice cream.

There's plenty of pumpkin on this list, but squash deserves the time to shine, too. Here, we opt for delicata squash for ease (it doesn't require peeling!) but also flavor. Roasted in the oven and nestled atop a goat cheese filling and flaky pastry, this savory pie is everything you want in an autumn dinner. 

With its burnished top and custardy interior, this Pumpkin Basque Cheesecake offers something different than pumpkin pie or even an American-style cheesecake. Plus, the batter easily comes together in a food processor to make prep a cinch. 

If you can't resist getting a caramel apple at the fair, this cake is for you. This cake includes applesauce, apple pie spice, and boiled cider for plenty of fall flavor, but the true star is the whipped caramel frosting. Made by whipping caramel until silky and light, it glides on like a dream and provides the perfect dose of complex flavor without the overwhelming sweetness or stickiness of traditional caramel.

Fall baking calls for bold flavors. From the heat and tang of kimchi to the richness of cheese, this sesame-crusted bread is destined to become the sidekick to soups all season long. 

The French know a thing or two about baking with apples (see #11, the Mostly Apples Apple Cake), and perhaps no recipe is as classic — or elegant — as the Tarte Tatin. Comprised of deeply caramelized apples layered over buttery pastry, it’s a dessert that stuns. Here, we've tested endlessly to ensure this sometimes-fussy dessert goes off without a hitch in your home kitchen.

A hallmark of the Mid-Autumn Festival is the making and eating of mooncakes, which are often given as gifts to express love and best wishes. Mooncakes consist of tender pastry dough that gets wrapped around a filling and then pressed into a special mold to create a beautifully embossed design that signifies longevity and prosperity. This baked version, filled with sweetened red bean paste (and often salted egg yolks to represent the full moon), is among the most popular type of mooncake.

Is it a bar? A slab pie? Both! This breezy recipe swaps the flaky pastry for a buttery shortbread crust but keeps the warm, gooey apples and classic spices for a sliceable, portable dessert. To finish, there's a crumbly streusel topping inspired by Dutch apple pie.

These Pumpkin Crinkle Cookies are our fall twist on the beloved chocolate crinkle. Mixed by hand, the egg-free dough yields spiced cookies that are irresistibly soft and chewy. 

This fragrant, buttery bread is steeped in history and tradition — for many, the fall holiday of Día de los Muertos would not be complete without this symbolic loaf. But symbolism aside, it's also a delicious enriched sweet bread, with whispers of orange and anise perfuming each soft, fluffy slice. 

The natural flavor of sweet potatoes are front-and-center in this recipe inspired by an Old Farmer's Almanac favorite. It's moist, subtly spiced, and crusted in sweet, buttery pecans.

This recipe, from contributor Jordan Smith, is one of our all-time favorite scone recipes. Ripples of fig jam are layered between a cornmeal-and-rosemary dough; they're flaky but sturdy. If you need a break from pumpkin and apple, these scones will convince you that fig and rosemary is an underrated but essential fall flavor combo.

Consider this a classic fall bake, perfected. While many pumpkin chocolate chip bread recipes use just 1 cup of pumpkin purée, this recipe uses the full can so you can actually taste it. The trick is to cook the pumpkin on the stove for a few minutes with spices and sugar to concentrate the flavor.

Oatmeal raisin cookies? Tired. Oatmeal Date Smash Cookies? Wired. These cookies prove that a fall recipe is as much about vibes as it is about apples and pumpkin. Because while oats and dates may not read as explicitly autumnal, these cookies embody the same warm, cozy, comforting spirit as a hot bowl of oatmeal on a cool fall morning. We love them for their thick, fudgy interior and thin, crackly exterior, which comes from the genius smashing method for which they're named.

More is more in this apple-forward bake. There's just enough almond-scented batter to hold together a mound of thiny sliced apples. As the batter rises in the oven, it knits those slices together to create a tender cake that’s almost creamy and custardy from the abundance of apples.

Warning: Do not let these biscuits' humble appearance fool you! They have all the flakiness of a traditional biscuit, with two flavorful tricks up their sleeve. They're made by browning a portion of the butter, which adds its signature toasted, nutty flavor, and get a hefty dose of fresh sage, brown butter's natural companion, which is flecked through the dough and used as a garnish on top of each biscuit.

These bars are everything you love about gooey pecan pie, without the fuss of rolling out pie crust. (So: easier and just as delicious.) Instead, make a press-in brown sugar shortbread crust and stir together an easy (we promise!) honey-infused caramel on the stove. This recipe makes two dozen bars which can easily feed a crowd, and we can already guarantee people will be going back for seconds.

Like all great art, this recipe has layers. At the top is a thin, crackly vanilla glaze, blanketing the cake like the first frost of the season. Peeking through is a layer of moist, buttery chocolate crumble. And beneath it all lies a soft, spiced pumpkin cake. Each component shines, but together they become a complex crumb cake that offers a little bit of everything in one bite. Pumpkin cakes can be routine this time of year, but this one is both familiar and intriguing enough — plus just plain delicious — that it had to crack the top ten. 

These muffins may look unassuming from the outside, but they hide a secret within. Filled with a sweet ripple of cinnamon and topped with a buttery oat-pecan streusel, they're more like coffee cake than muffins, and are over-the-top in the best way possible. 

This recipe skips the hot vat of frying oil and turns everyone's favorite fall doughnut into a dense, velvety cake filled with cinnamon-spiced apples and adorned with sweet vanilla glaze. The tender cake is made using the reverse-creaming method, one of our favorite cake mixing techniques, which yields a delicate crumb that is still sturdy enough to support the mountain of sweet, sticky chopped apples the cake holds. Dare we say it's even better than the fritter that inspired it?

Fall calls for comfort food. Specifically: warm, cheesy breads. Tearing into this soft, flavor-packed loaf is immensely satisfying. Each slice is crowned with a golden crust, while the interior is filled with jalapeños that bring the heat and a generous helping of melted cheddar.

There’s no way we could omit cinnamon rolls from a list of the best fall bakes. Soft, golden, and generously sized, these cinnamon rolls are the best way to start a crisp fall morning. The extra-tender buttermilk dough gets an additional boost of fall flavor from roasted sweet potato. To finish, the rolls are coated with a rich, buttery vanilla frosting.

This recipe captures the classic, nostalgic flavor of a freshly fried apple cider doughnut after a day at the orchard. Instead of being fried, these mini cake doughnuts are baked, dunked in cider-spiked butter, and coated in cinnamon sugar. Best served warm, they taste shockingly similar to the original, no frying (or trip to the orchard) required.

As soon as the calendar flips to fall, many of our colleagues have declared that this is the recipe they have to make, and it nearly landed at #1 on this list because it's so beloved. What sets these cookies apart is their texture: Most pumpkin cookies are soft and cakey due to the high moisture content in pumpkin purée, but cooking that purée on the stove before adding it to the batter gives these cookies a dense, chewy, almost fudgy texture. If you love pumpkin spice, you have to make this recipe.

With an old-school name and humble appearance, this cake may not seem like much. But there's a reason we named it our #1 fall recipe with near unanimous consensus: It's magic. Absolutely loaded with diced apples and studded with toasted walnuts, this moist, spiced cake is more than the sum of its parts. Then there's the fudgy brown sugar frosting, which is like penuche spiked with a dash of tangy boiled cider.  

And we're not the only ones who love it: This recipe has long been treasured by our audience, who have left over 300 perfect five-star reviews. Bakers have called it "the apple cake of your dreams," "a raging success," and "perfect for the first day of fall." Said one reviewer: "I don't know what was better — the moist, spiced, apple-y cake, or the delicious, fudge-y, apple-y frosting!" We highly suggest making it and deciding for yourself.