Make The Best Dessert Tamales Of Your Life With These Sweet Ingredients

Tamales may be best known as a main dish stuffed with meat or beans (or shrimp and roasted garlic, if you're using Bobby Flay's recipe), but sweetened corn dough can be used to make a dessert version. Cookbook author Rick Martínez, who published "Mi Cocina" in 2022, notes sweet tamales are quite popular in Mexico. At their simplest, Martínez tells us, the ingredients are "basically just like corn, sugar, eggs, and baking powder and maybe a little vanilla or cinnamon to flavor it up."

Martínez adds that corn grown in Mexico tends to have more starch than the kind grown in the U.S., so he says in that country, they can use fresh corn ground to a paste in the blender. North of the border, though, it's best to stick with masa. The flour is combined with the other ingredients to make a sweet dough, then it's rolled up in a corn husk and steamed the same way you would a savory tamale. These plain tamales, which Martínez compares to corn pudding, can be made even sweeter with a topping of honey, whipped cream, or ice cream.

Dessert tamales needn't be plain corn ones, however. In Mexico, they're often flavored with pineapple. The pineapple isn't necessarily used as a filling, since Rick Martínez says roast pineapple is often mixed straight into the dough. Pineapple tamales made this way, he says, have "kind of got that kind of airy cake-like texture ... just delicious." He says that berries, too, can be mixed into the dough, or berry jam can be used as a filling. Other dessert tamales are flavored with dulce de leche or brown sugar and chopped toasted pecans.

Yes, chocolate tamales are a thing. The easiest way to make them may be to mix some cocoa powder into the sweetened masa dough, although you could also add melted chocolate, chocolate chips, or even all three to create triple chocolate tamales. Martínez notes that you may need to add more liquid and oil or butter to the dough, so the cocoa powder won't make it too dry.

Dessert tamales needn't even be made with corn. Martinez tells us that one of his favorites, a tamale he's only eaten in one place, was made with rice. "Imagine a rice pudding," he tells us, "but in a corn husk and steamed so ... it's more like a [baked] custard." The flavor, he says, was "incredible."