Save room for dessert, the coda to a brilliant meal and an opportunity to leave customers feeling satisfied and happy.

If your dessert menu is rife with lava cakes and bread pudding, consider dusting it off and updating to include something new. There are exciting things happening in the land of pastry, and we’ve rounded up five fun dessert trends for 2022.

Tea

From matcha to Earl Grey, tea has been finding its way into desserts more and more, and for good reason. Teas provide a boost of flavor at a relatively low price point, and they are incredibly varied. Desserts with creamy elements provide a good opportunity to experiment with infusing teas. Just steep the tea directly into the milk or cream before proceeding with the recipe as usual.

For cakes, you can prepare the tea as you normally would and then incorporate the tea when you’re mixing in your wet ingredients. Jasmine, chai, and chamomile are all perfect in a light, fluffy cake or mixed into shortbread. Guest House® Premium Teas offer an array of soothing and blends to add just the right hint of flavor.

Tiramisu

Tiramisu, an Italian confection combo of espresso-and-rum-soaked lady fingers layered with a creamy mascarpone cheese filling that raged in popularity in the late 1980s and 90s, is ready for its comeback. This time around, tiramisu could use a little innovation, so consider artful plating styles or unexpected flavor combinations to take your tiramisu to new heights. And since both tiramisu and espresso martinis are having a moment right now, it might be wise to consider other ways you can incorporate the flavor of espresso in your dessert and cocktail menus.

Speculoos

Otherwise known as “Biscoff,” speculoos (pronounced speck-u-lows) are cookies traditional to the Netherlands and Belgium around Christmas time. The warm flavors include ginger, cardamom, and cinnamon. When blended into a cookie butter, speculoos takes on a new life where they function much the same way as Nutella, meaning you can (and should) add them to just about anything, from pie to cheesecake to…other cookies. Yes, cookies made out of cookie butter—cookie inception at its most delicious.

Banoffee

It’s not bananas and coffee, but rather bananas and toffee in this British-born flavor combo. Best known in pie form, banoffee combines bananas and caramel, usually with a crumbly cookie crust, but banoffee is ripe for riffing. Consider a banoffee parfait or switch up the classic caramel with a third flavor, perhaps lime or chili to bring in something a bit unexpected.

Kumquat

This winter citrus has been popping up everywhere, but it’s not just oranges and lemons. Kumquats (a tiny, super sour citrus that can be eaten whole), calamansi (a hybrid citrus from the Philippines), and yuzu (a tart, East Asian citrus) are bringing the sunshine to all sorts of winter desserts, from Pavlovas to layer cakes. As a rule, these fruits deliver bright, cheek-puckering flavor that provides an exciting contrast to sweets. Try candying them in simple syrup or zesting them into buttercream.