I love making homemade pizza for dinner. And it is pretty much the only meal my oldest son requests. It’s also a great “filler” when making my meal plan for the week, because it uses basic ingredients that I generally already have on hand.

But only recently did it dawn on me that I could also make homemade dessert pizza. I guess I had thought dessert pizza was some extraordinary and mysterious food found exclusively at the Pizza Hut buffets and in the Lunchables that marked my childhood.

Well. Once I realized this hot gooey goodness could be produced in my own home kitchen, I didn’t waste any time trying it out.

Game. Changer.

Finding the Right Dessert Pizza Recipe

There are lots of recipes for dessert pizzas that use canned pie filling. Personally, I’m just not a fan of canned pie filling.

There are also plenty of recipes using fresh fruit and some kind of cookie crust. Those are great for summer parties. But for the purpose of adding a dessert pizza to our family pizza night, I wanted to use the same dough that I would already be making for the other pizzas, and also stick to ingredients I generally have on hand, so I could easily whip it up alongside dinner.

In my searching, I came across this recipe from Sugar Spun Run. It was the perfect candidate.

The Road to Success

However, it didn’t make sense to me that the original recipe uses a yeast dough, but never lets it rise. Plus, I already had a pizza dough recipe I love (based on this superb garlic knot recipe from The Recipe Critic). So I subbed in my own dough recipe. This makes it super easy to just make a big batch of dough, then divide some out for the dessert pizza.

Don’t let the yeast dough scare you from trying this recipe! Trust me, it is super easy and you will love the results!

I also happened to have some butterscotch chips in the pantry when I first tried this dessert pizza recipe, so I threw a handful of those in with the chocolate chips. The flavor combination was out of this world. The cream cheese base, chocolate chips and butterscotch chips formed the perfect trifecta. So, butterscotch chips are now a must when making dessert pizza!

Recipe Notes

• For the purposes of this blog, I have cut back the amount of dough to make this a stand-alone dessert pizza recipe. You can simply double or triple the dough if you would like to use it for dinner pizzas as well.
• The first step in making the dough involves blooming the yeast; this gives it a head start, and allows you to make sure your yeast is working properly.
• Instead of measuring the temperature of the water for yeast dough, I just test it with my finger. It should feel like very warm bath water.
• The butterscotch chips really take this to another level. But if you don’t have them on hand, or want to try other flavors, you could easily substitute them for chocolate chips, or any other flavor chips!

Looking for more sweet ideas? Try my Chocolate Chip Epiphany Cookies!