Autumn desserts: how to fit them into your meal plan

To have autumn desserts all week, decide each one when you decide dinner: on weeknights, seasonal fruit as it is or something that cooks itself in the oven, like a baked apple; on Sunday, one dessert that lasts several days, like a pumpkin loaf or an apple crumble. Then put what they need on the same shopping list as the rest of the meal plan.

Most autumn dessert recipes assume a free afternoon and a mood for baking. Weeknights rarely offer either, so dessert gets decided at ten at night in front of the fridge, which is how it ends up being a yogurt or the biscuit tin. You don’t need more recipes. You need to know, on Sunday, which dessert goes with which dinner.

What autumn fruit you have to hand

Autumn is the most generous season for dessert: apples and pears are at their best, and plums, figs, pomegranates, grapes and chestnuts join them. Pumpkin and squash, already in your dinners, work for dessert too.

Easy desserts with autumn fruit, and where they fit in the week.

Fruit	Easy dessert	When	Make ahead?
Apples	Baked apples with cinnamon	Weeknight, with dinner’s oven	No: they cook while you eat
Pears	Poached or stewed pears	Sunday	Yes, they keep in the fridge
Plums	Plum crumble	Sunday	Yes
Figs	Halved, with yogurt and honey	Weeknight	No
Pomegranate	Seeds over a yogurt	Weeknight	Seed it on Sunday
Grapes	A bunch on the table, or with cheese	Weeknight	No
Pumpkin	Pumpkin loaf	Sunday	Yes, it lasts several days
Chestnuts	Roasted chestnuts	Weekend	No: eat them warm

On weeknights, fruit as it is or a dessert that makes itself

From Monday to Thursday, dessert shouldn’t take more effort than putting a plate on the table. A bowl of grapes, a couple of figs with yogurt or a pomegranate’s seeds are complete autumn desserts, and the only decision is buying them in time.

If you fancy something warm, pick desserts that don’t need watching: stewed apple simmers in a pan while you clear up, and covers tonight and tomorrow.

Use the oven you’re already heating

If a dinner goes in the oven, dessert can go on the next shelf. Baked apples, pears or plums with a little honey go in with the traybake and come out as you finish eating.

That’s why it pays to look at the week’s dinners before choosing desserts: roast chicken night is baked apple night. The oven is already on.

One Sunday dessert that lasts three days

Sunday is the time for the dessert that takes longer, as long as it covers several evenings. A pumpkin loaf, an apple crumble or a rice pudding is made once and does Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. It’s the same idea as batch cooking: cook once so you don’t decide every day.

Pick just one. Two homemade desserts at once end up competing in the fridge, and the second loses.

Decide dessert at the same time as dinner

This is the step that changes the week: when you plan your dinners, add the dessert to the same slot. If the plan is already made, dessert takes a minute, and the routine for planning the weekly menu as a family works just the same.

An autumn week with dessert, Monday 26 October to Sunday 1 November.

Day	Dinner	Dessert
Monday	Butternut squash soup and cheese toasties	Pumpkin loaf (from Sunday)
Tuesday	Lentil and vegetable stew	Pumpkin loaf
Wednesday	Roast chicken traybake	Baked apples, in the same oven
Thursday	Chicken noodle soup	Pears
Friday	Homemade pizza	Grapes and cheese
Saturday	Jacket potatoes with beans	Toffee apples, for Halloween
Sunday	Fish pie	Apple crumble (for three days)

Only the loaf and the crumble take real cooking, and each covers several evenings. The rest is fruit, Halloween’s toffee apples, or an oven that was on anyway.

Dessert goes on the shopping list too

A planned dessert has ingredients, and they go on the list with everything else: the oats and butter for the crumble, the squash left over from Monday’s soup, the apples for Wednesday. If you make the shopping list from the meal plan, dessert goes on dish by dish, like one more dinner.

With fruit, buy for the day it’ll be eaten. A pear that’s ripe on Monday won’t make it to Thursday, so Thursday’s is bought still firm and tomorrow’s ripe.

What to leave out

• An elaborate dessert every night. One on Sunday and fruit the rest of the week is a plan you keep; seven bakes is not.
• All the week’s fruit ripe on Monday. By Friday you’re doing fruit-bowl archaeology.
• Recipes with an ingredient you’ll never use again. The jar of spice bought for one loaf lives at the back of the cupboard until next autumn.
• Dessert as a reward. If there are children at home, “finish your vegetables and you get pudding” turns dinner into a hurdle. The guide to meal planning with kids explains why one menu for the whole house works better.

A planned dessert is the one that gets eaten

The best autumn desserts aren’t the showiest; they’re the ones already decided when the evening arrives. Thinking of them alongside dinner, with the fruit you have and the oven you’re already heating, is enough to get the season onto the table without an afternoon of baking.

Doing it with Wenu

In Wenu, a slot in the Calendar can hold more than one dish: dinner and, under it, its dessert. When you add a dish, choose “Dessert” under Course, next to Entry, Main and Side, and it shows with its tag in the Calendar and in the weekly menu email. Keep the desserts you make in autumn in Recipes, with their ingredients, and plan them from there like any other dish.

Wenu doesn’t suggest recipes or know which fruit in your bowl is ripe: it works with the dishes you already cook. On Free you type the shopping list yourself; with Pro it fills itself with the ingredients of what you plan, desserts included, everyone at home sees the same menu, and Ideas reminds you of the desserts you haven’t made in a while.