Fruity Dessert Pizza with Mascarpone and Nutella

Sitting just outside my kitchen door is perhaps the most completely amazing tool in my culinary arsenal.  And that would be, of course, our pizza oven.  The oven itself is capable of so much more, but we most often use it for pizza.

Before we even started building this place, we had it in our minds to include a pizza oven in our plans, and as you can see from the photos, the Husband was pretty serious about it.  He researched the technical aspects of building an oven, but the aesthetic came purely from his head and his heart.  For several weeks he placed stone upon stone, and I was, and still am, blown away by its perfection.

Of course, you don’t need a pizza oven to make a great pizza… we turn out great pizza from the kitchen oven when the weather is uncooperative and cooking outside is just a bad idea.  In any case, we do a lot of pizza around here.  Dessert pizza has become one of our very favorites recently, and this one in particular is unbelievably good. 

So just grab your favorite pizza dough (here’s my dough recipe) and roll it out to about 12 inches.  Combine some mascarpone cheese with some sugar and vanilla and spread that over your dough. 

Top that with the fruit of your choice and bake until the crust is just puffy and slightly golden.

Drizzle your pizza with some Nutella and a little more of that mascarpone cheese and be prepared to have your hair blown back.  This really is so much better than you can even imagine.  Here’s the recipe…

FruityDessert Pizza with Mascarpone and Nutella

Click here for a printable recipe

I love using my vanilla sugar in this, so if you have that, by all means use it!  To make vanilla sugar, just save up some vanilla beans from which you’ve already extracted the seeds.  Fill a 2 cup container with sugar and stuff your vanilla beans down into the sugar.  Seal tightly and keep for a couple of weeks.  Just replenish as you use the sugar.  Also, do not use frozen, thawed berries in this.  They contain too much moisture which makes the whole thing soggy.

Homemadeor store-bought pizza dough

For each 12-inch pizza…

4 oz mascarpone cheese (1/2 of an 8-oz tub)

3 tablespoons of sugar

2 teaspoons vanilla

2 to 3 cups of fresh berries (I used strawberries, blueberries, blackberries)

1/3 cup Nutella

Optional toppings:  mint leaves, toasted pine nuts, raspberries, or substitute fresh, sliced peaches for the berries

Preheat your oven to 450 or 500 degrees.

Whisk together the mascarpone cheese, sugar and vanilla.  Spread ¾ of this over the pizza dough.  Slice your strawberries in half and lay them cut side down over the mascarpone.  Sprinkle the blueberries and blackberries over this.  Bake in a preheated oven until the crust is puffed and golden brown.

Warm the nutella in the microwave for a few seconds and drizzle this over the pizza.  Drizzle the rest of the mascarpone mixture over the top of that and enjoy!