Making good, healthy desserts doesn’t have to steal away an afternoon of baking (or 12 hours waiting on a dehydrator). One of my favorite desserts – beautiful, fresh fruit energy tarts – take just 10 minutes start-to-finish. Thanks to using simple healthy substitutions and time-saving tricks, these tarts emanate big flavor, well-rounded nutrition, and are healthy enough to be consumed at any time of the day. We healthy dessert people are pretty sneaky, no?

Here are my secrets to making a fast and healthy fresh fruit energy tart:

1. Leave the oven off: With just a few exceptions, the less whole foods are cooked, the more vitamins, enzymes and phytonutrients they contain. Additionally, tarts are usually served at room temperature anyway, so rather than heat a recipe up just to cool it down again, simply keep it at room temperature and make it perfect to begin with.
2. Make a base of energy: Instead of using a nutritional black hole (aka a conventional pie crust), use whole food energy bars as the base of the tart. Just pick your favorite bar and treat it as a firm dough, pressing it into a tart mold to take the desired shape. Shazaam – crust finished. I especially like Vega’s Vibrancy Bars as well as Larabars because they taste delicious, are made entirely from nutritionally dense foods, and have a perfect moistness that makes them ideal for pressing into a crust form. Using energy bars not only packs in a ton of nutrition, it’s also like the world’s greatest time saver. (NOTE – not every type of bar in the world works for this application – use bars with a softer texture like the ones I’ve mentioned).
3. Use the inherent sweetness of fruit: Nature has a sweet tooth too – it’s called fruit. Dressed up with a just little bit of spice, and combined with other fruits or a smidgen of natural sweetener like yacon syrup, fruit fleshes out these desserts dramatically. Using fresh fruit bulks up the size, lowers the caloric impact, boosts nutrition, and adds that sweet goodness without all the sugar or fat. Great fruits for tartlets include apples, pears, peaches, mangoes, bananas and figs.

Of course, these guidelines are really only flirting with your creativity in making the super tart combo of your wildest dreams. Not dreaming yet? Here’s my basic tried and true recipe for Apple-Pear Energy Tartlets.