Stuck at home? Time to bring some Disney magic into the kitchen! There are a lot of recipes for Disney favorites online, so we decided to focus on one of the most popular areas of Disney dining first: sweets and desserts.
Whether cooking is your happy place or if you can barely cook oatmeal, here are eight Disney parks sweet treats you can make at home.
1. Dole Whip Float – Adventureland (and basically everywhere tropical)
Let’s just get right to it—some of you straight up have the Dole Whip twitch right now.
I’m sort of astonished how many years it took me to finally try a Dole Whip Float. This magnificent pineapple soft serve escaped my attention for decades of park visits. The more I saw people rave about it online, the more my curiosity piqued until I finally had the opportunity to try a Dole Whip Float on a quiet morning at Magic Kingdom.
Sweet Dole Whip, where had you been all my life?
Dole Whip is one of those mysterious magical desserts that I really expected to be too complicated for the average home cook to make, but making Dole Whip at home actually isn’t that complicated. The simplest recipes, like this one from Bigger Bolder Baking, involve only two ingredients: frozen pineapple and coconut milk. Really, Dole Whip is just a very thick smoothie of sorts.
If you want something a little more refined, Delish.com took a crack at a more advanced Dole Whip copycat involving some additional ingredients like frozen bananas and sweetened condensed milk. Even this recipe isn’t that difficult, and it adds some nice textures that might make the end result closer to Disney’s.
Whichever Dole Whip version you end up liking, turning it into a float is easy—just add pineapple juice! Tastes just like Adventureland in a cup!
2. Pongu Lumpia (The World of Pandora, Disney’s Animal Kingdom)
It’s not too hard to find recipes online for Mickey Beignets and churros, but we didn’t want to just focus on the obvious Disney recipes you can try at home. What about some of Disney’s more eclectic sweet treats?
If you’ve been to The World of Pandora at Disney’s Animal Kingdom, you may have had the pleasure of trying Pongu Lumpia, a native Pandoran pastry dish (wonderfully in line with the land’s exotic sci-fi dining scene). The dessert could best be described as a sort of spring roll filled with cream cheese and pineapple (got to get that Vitamin C).
Fortunately, Disney provided a recipe to make your own Pongu Lumpia at home. Most of the ingredients are pretty simple to find, and spring roll wrappers are available in the Asian section of many national grocery stores. The end result is a crispy sweet pastry perfectly suited to Pandora and a great way to bring a little Disney magic home.
3. The Grey Stuff (Be Our Guest, Magic Kingdom)
Guests who have actually managed to get a reservation at Magic Kingdom’s Be Our Guest restaurant all seem to agree with Lumiere— try the Grey Stuff. It’s delicious.
Didn’t get to try the Grey Stuff before the shutdown or just craving a cup of that mysterious monochrome pudding? This is another Disney desserts favorite that is surprisingly simple and totally kid-friendly. Disney published a recipe on their Family site that breaks down the main ingredients as being Oreos (“scalloped cookies” for copyright purposes), chocolate and vanilla pudding mix, whipped cream, and milk. Blend it up and BAM—you’ve got Grey Stuff.
It really doesn’t get more complicated than that. Other recipes include the addition of some edible pearl sprinkles to add that Be Our Guest touch, but this one is pretty straightforward!
4. Peanut Butter and Jelly Milkshake (50’s Prime Time Café, Disney’s Hollywood Studios)
Disney’s Hollywood Studios isn’t usually the first park you think of when it comes to food at Walt Disney World—until the opening of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, the park’s dining options all followed pretty familiar patterns. However, the park has been home to a few favorite dishes over the years, including an unusual milkshake guests can’t rave about enough.
The Peanut Butter and Jelly Milkshake at the 50’s Prime Time Café is often cited as many guests’ favorite dessert drink in all of Walt Disney World. This concept is as simple as it sounds, and it’s a mega-easy Disney favorite to make at home. The ingredients are as straightforward as peanut butter, grape jelly, vanilla ice cream, and milk of your choosing. The Disney Food Blog did a nice job explaining how to get the recipe just right, as well as some tips for tweaking it to your preferences. For example, you can always change the jelly if your kids aren’t a fan of grape flavor.
5. School Bread (Kringla Bakery, Norway, Epcot)
We could probably do an entire article about recipes from Epcot’s Kringla Bakery—delicious rice cream, lefse, troll horns… Long before Frozen and it’s adorable snowman rolled into town, this bakery was a mainstay favorite in World Showcase. If we were to narrow down our Norwegian sweet aspirations to one item, we would have to pick the school bread.
School bread is a popular Norwegian pastry that sort of defies description for the unfamiliar. Like most of Kringla’s items, it’s not ultra-sweet (a nice break from Disney’s usual sugar-coma-inducing fare). The bread is light and airy, with a pleasant spice from fresh cardamom. The best part of the whole thing is the buttery cream in the center and on top, sprinkled with toasted coconut.
Up to the challenge? A few Disney DIY bakers have attempted to take on school bread. This is a traditional Norwegian recipe, so versions of it abound. If your focus is set on replicating Disney’s version, Disney Food Blog comes to the rescue again with a nice recipe that follow’s Kringla’s model. If you’d like to try something a little more traditional, you can try this recipe from Delicious.com (it’s not too different for purists).
6. Mickey Mouse Rice Krispies Treats (like every bakery in Disney parks)
If you’re not exactly Top Chef material when it comes to your cooking skills (like this writer), take courage that you don’t need a culinary degree to get your Disney sweets fix. As a matter of fact, one of the most iconic desserts in Disneyland and Walt Disney World is just a Mickey shaped version of one of the simplest desserts in America.
There are a few variations on the original Rice Krispies treat recipe, but it seems like Disney takes a few liberties with theirs. The average rice treat from Main Street Bakery or Boardwalk Bakery have a distinct taste of extra butter, and you could even choose to jazz yours up like Disney does with chocolate, sprinkles, and marshmallows. Sally’s Baking Addiction has a great recipe for rice treats that fall pretty close to Disney’s style, or you if you’re feeling a little more creative, you can try this recipe from Sarah’s Bake Studio for Disney-specific rice treats.
If all this is too complicated, you really can just make traditional Rice Krispies treats and either mold or cut them into a Mickey shape, but more advanced bakers can definitely make things more elaborate.
7. Fruit and Nutella Waffle Sandwich (Sleepy Hollow, Magic Kingdom)
The Fruit and Nutella Waffle Sandwich is one of those Magic Kingdom hidden gems that tastes as good as it looks. Making one at home requires a little hardware, but there are a few ways you can get around it if you don’t have a waffle iron.
For one thing, if you’re lazy like me, you could cheat using frozen waffles from your local store, just focusing your efforts on mixing the Nutella and fruit. If you don’t care about your waffles looking like, well, waffles, you could makeshift some waffles on a George Foreman grill. These might be awful—but hey, look at all the time we have on our hands these days?
If you have the necessary hardware (even many grocery stores sell waffle makers), cranking out some world class-waffles isn’t too difficult. Eat at Home Cooks has a great recipe that includes help making your waffles and adding the fruit and Nutella. In truth, you can use a pre-made waffle mix to simplify things, but that all depends on how adventurous you’re feeling!
8. Tonga Toast (Kona Café, Disney’s Polynesian Resort)
It’s the ultimate Disney breakfast-dessert hybrid. It’s a dish so insane, a Hawaiian mad scientist must have cooked it up in a lab. Some bloggers have gone so far as to say it’s one of the best things they ever ate at Walt Disney World.
Kona Café at Disney’s Polynesian Resort is home to Tonga Toast, the most wonderful breakfast monstrosity ever concocted by Disney chefs. It’s essentially two massive pieces of sourdough French toast stuffed with bananas, fried, and coated in cinnamon sugar. I told you it was bonkers, and you can bring this ludicrous taste of Disney perfection to your kitchen thanks to the painstaking efforts of home chefs with way more cooking talent than me.
Once again, Disney Food Blog comes to the rescue with a straightforward recipe you can make with easy to find ingredients. If you want to fancy things up a bit, Delish adds some extra elements to the recipe with a strawberry compote and heavy cream. Needless to say, I would plan to eat your Tonga Toast on a morning when you can take a long, long nap afterwards—you’re not going to want to move after this particular carb-loading session.
Enjoy this article? Keep reading to take a tour with us through The Most Peaceful Places at Walt Disney World or to hear about the times our wonderful readers totally changed this writer’s mind!
