Desserts

This is the smallest section on the site, and deliberately so.
Neither a slow cooker nor an air fryer is a natural dessert machine. A slow cooker cannot brown, cannot crisp, and holds humidity, which rules out most baking. An air fryer is a small convection oven with a violent fan, which is excellent for a few things and destructive to anything with a loose batter.
So rather than force the appliances into recipes they are wrong for, this section covers the handful of desserts they genuinely do better, plus the small-batch baking that suits a household of one or two.
What a slow cooker is actually good at
Anything steamed or custard-textured. Bread pudding, rice pudding, poached fruit, sticky puddings, dulce de leche made from a sealed tin. The sealed, humid environment that ruins a cake is exactly right for these. Slow cooker cheesecake works for the same reason a water bath works in an oven.
What an air fryer is actually good at
Small quantities of anything that wants a crisp exterior. Hand pies, turnovers, cookies in batches of four, roasted stone fruit, doughnuts made from biscuit dough. The strength is speed and surface. The limitation is volume, since one layer is the maximum that will ever cook evenly.
Small-batch baking
A good deal of what appears here is scaled for two, because most dessert recipes assume a household that will finish a nine-inch cake. Two-banana banana bread, four-cookie batches, single-portion crumbles. The scaling is not simply division. Smaller volumes cook faster and dry out sooner, so times and temperatures are adjusted and stated rather than inferred.
What will not appear here
Slow cooker recipes for things that want dry heat. A slow cooker brownie is a technically possible object and a genuinely worse brownie than an oven produces in half the time. Where the oven is simply the right tool, that is what the recipe will say.
Everything below has been made and photographed here, including the versions that did not work the first time.