1. Nanaimo Bar

Nanaimo bar is a pastry originating in Canada at 🇨🇦. Named after the West Coast city of Nanaimo where it originated, Nanaimo strips are simple to make, do not require an oven, and are popular throughout North America. Nanaimo strips are tamped down with crushed cookies and topped with a layer of melted chocolate with a light vanilla or custard frosting.

This dessert has 3 layers, the first layer is waffles, the second layer is cream icing, and the last layer is chocolate. Other variations of Nanaimo strips use different cookie crumbles or frosting (such as peanut butter instead), and the top layer of chocolate can be flavored differently, or decorated with additions. Two popular variations of Nanaimo strips are made with mint-flavored and mocha coffee-flavored icing.

2.Butter Tarts

hese famous Canadian butter tarts consist of a flaky pastry shell filled with a rich buttery caramel centre. They are a perfect sweet indulgence whether you’re Canadian or not.

A butter tart is a small pastry tart filled with a deliciously gooey semi-solid syrup made up of butter, sugar, and eggs. Often dried fruit or nuts are added to the filling. These sweet little gems are said to have originated in Quebec back in the 1600s. Though, the first printed recipe for butter tarts was published in The Women’s Auxiliary of the Royal Victoria Hospital Cookbook in 1900, out of Barrie, Ontario.

The original version of Canadian butter tarts was made with maple sugar, freshly churned butter, and dried fruit such as raisins or currents. Butter tarts became all the rage in the 1920s and 1930s. It’s one of the few authentically Canadian recipes that exist on paper. (source: Food Network Canada and Food Blogger of Canada) Whether a true butter tart has a runny or firm filling, plain or with raisins, is a matter of passionate national debate. For me, it’s a matter of personal preference with no right or wrong.

3. Flapper Pie

Flapper pie is a graham crumb crust pie filled with a decadent, creamy custard filling topped with a meringue. It’s so unique to the prairies that if you didn’t grow up here you most likely haven’t ever heard of it. Indeed, perhaps not many Albertans have heard of flapper pie, this is a Manitoba recipe straight from the family archives, one that would have been passed around the farms!

Flapper pie seems to have been popular with my grandma’s generation……then just plainly died out. My mom never made it. I never had it at my friends houses. When I asked around, so few people have heard of it. Even fewer have ever baked it! What once was a staple in prairie kitchens is now a rarity to find, unless you are lucky enough to still find an older generation baking it in their cafe or restaurant, such as the one in Pine Lake.

4. Blueberry Grunt

It's a Canadian classic. Canada's Atlantic provinces were home to French settlers who cooked blueberries, which were abundant in the region, in POTS over open fires. grunt is the sound that blueberries make when they are slowly cooking and bubbling. A simple cookie or dumpling on top of sugared and braised berries makes a great summer dessert.

The hospitality is so deeply rooted in Canada's history that it's how the men who built the historic Fort Prince of Wales on Hudson Bay in the 1700s would enjoy it after a long day of work. Today, it can be found in restaurants, cafes and many people's homes, often topped with a large scoop of vanilla ice cream.

5. Pouding Chomeur

Legend has it that the pouding was created by factory workers during the Great Depression, women making do with few ingredients, including butter, flour, milk and eggs. The sweet caramel sauce that bathes the simple batter was likely made from brown sugar during economic hard times, and was later replaced with maple syrup. The dessert is considered to be quintessential Québécois cuisine and The Oxford Companion to Food notes that it draws on French cooking techniques that were adapted to a new environment. Made with maple syrup, as opposed to brown sugar, the dish is an example of the province’s syncretic cuisine that, since colonization, has combined ingredients from Aboriginal traditions with European foods.

Pouding chômeur was commonplace in Québec home cooking until recently. As accessible as a caramel-doused cake might be to people outside of Québec, in 2010 it was noted in The New York Times Magazine that the dish was a “delight that Canadians have been keeping to themselves” — or more accurately, the Québécois. Although a Québécois staple, a recipe for a dessert called maple pudding, was submitted by a Mrs. Marion Miller to a community cookbook titled Recipes from Ottawa Hostesses in 1960. This shows that the dish did at least cross into Ontario, though Mrs. Miller’s recipe is dressed up with walnuts.

6. Saskatoon Berry Pie

A warm and light piece of traditional Canadian Saskatoon berry pie is a regional trademark, especially when accompanied by a scoop of vanilla ice cream or a dollop of whipped cream on the side. It is made with Saskatoon berries, native to Western Canada, which grow from the Plains to the coast of British Columbia.

The indigenous people of Canada used Saskatoon berries as a food source, grinding them into a paste and drying them for storage over the winter. Later, they were used in pemmican, pies, and various desserts. The city of Saskatoon in Canada is, in fact, named after these same berries, which are also protected by the Slow Food initiative.

The pie is made from flour, pie pastry, butter, eggs, and Saskatoon berries (similar to blueberries, but harder and with smaller seeds, drier and earthier in flavor). Today, Canadian Saskatoon berry pie is served in many Saskatchewan and Alberta confectioneries and pastry shops as a signature dessert.

7. Tiger Tail Ice Cream

Canadians love their tiger tail ice cream. Oddly enough, this retro favorite is almost impossible to find outside of the Great White North. Tiger tail doesn’t call for rare ingredients foraged from the Canadian Rockies, nor is it intellectual property of the government. It just doesn’t seem to appeal to anyone except Canadians.

A ribbon of black licorice swirled into an orange-flavored ice cream base gives this tiger its stripes. The old-school flavor sold well in soda parlors from the 1950s to the 1970s, and many Canadians now consider it a childhood classic. As curious as it may seem, kids (and nostalgic adults) are among the biggest fans of the citrus and black licorice combination.

Local and international creameries in Canada sell tiger tail ice cream, including Baskin-Robbins and Kawartha Dairy. Ashley Chapman, vice president of Chapman’s Ice Cream in Ontario, Canada, notes that tiger tail isn’t one of their top sellers. They simply keep the endemically-beloved flavor around “because loyal tiger tail fans raise an enormous fuss whenever its future appears in jeopardy.”

8. Tarte Au Sucre（Sugar Pie）

Canadians from Quebec can thank tarte au sucre for their French heritage. Brown sugar was rare, so maple syrup was the most readily available sweetener for the early French settlers in Quebec. Mix maple syrup with some heavy cream, flour, butter and an egg, and you'll get a Quebec flavor on a classic cream pie.

While available year-round, no holiday table in French Canada would be complete without a tarte au sucre.

9. Beaver Tail

These fried pastry pockets are named after their resemblance to a beaver tail! They are usually sweet and come with maple syrup or powdered sugar, but are sometimes savory.

This is probably the most Canadian dessert ever. There is a whole chain that originated in Killaloe, ON called BeaverTails, where that’s all they sell!

But nothing tastes better than a homemade beaver tail recipe. Enjoy!

10. Sweet Bannock

This Native Canadian staple is the ultimate comfort food. Originating in Scotland (explorers used to fry bread on a baking sheet called the Bannock Stone), bannock fits the Canadian way of life. The use of available plants and cornmeal makes this fried bread easy to make even under the harshest conditions.

The basic ingredients are simple, flour, water, salt, lard, and there are variations like Bannock desserts. From simply sweetened with cinnamon and sugar or cooked with berries into a bread pudding, you can taste Canada's history with every bite.