20 Great Bakes That Are Sweet, Not Sugary

Sometimes the best bake is the one that puts sugar in the back seat. Take a perfect strawberry tart, or an in-season blueberry muffin — they're as much about the fruit and butter as they are the sugar that heightens them. Yes, they’re sweet. But not sugary-sweet.

Here, we’ve collected recipes that follow that model in a couple of different ways. Recipes for these classic strawberry shortcakes and this lemon Dutch baby lean on berries and citrus for their sweet-tart profile. Meanwhile, these doughnut muffins and brownies evade sugariness in a different way: they use our Baking Sugar Alternative.

Sugar plays a role (an important one!) in these recipes, but most of them use well under a cup. In several of these recipes, the sugar is there to balance the tartness of fresh fruits; if your fruit is sweet, you may not need as much sugar as the recipe calls for. Dial the sugar down in these recipes even further by following our guidelines here. But no need to go overboard. These recipes are meant to be sweet — just not sugary.