The Best Desserts and Ice Cream in Ann Arbor
Three ice cream operations, two bakery counters, and the honest truth that the list should be longer.
Ann Arbor's dessert scene has a pattern. The ice cream is strong. Genuinely strong, across three operations that take dairy seriously and treat flavor development like it matters. The bakeries produce pastries worth crossing town for. But sit-down restaurants with dedicated pastry programs? That list thins out fast.
This guide covers the places where dessert is the reason to go, not something that arrives after the entree because the menu had a page for it. The list is honest about its length. I would rather give you five places doing real work than pad it with ten that are fine.
The Ice Cream
Blank Slate Creamery (300 W Liberty St) | Single scoop ~$5, double ~$7
The seasonal rotation is the draw. Blank Slate makes small-batch ice cream that changes with the calendar. Late summer brings Michigan peach and blueberry. Fall shifts to apple cider and brown butter. Winter produces chocolate stout and espresso with toffee. The salted caramel stays year-round, and it functions as the baseline: buttery, balanced between sweet and salt, with depth that comes from cooking the caramel long enough to develop actual flavor rather than just sugar.
The texture is what separates Blank Slate from a competent ice cream shop. Dense without being heavy. Creamy without the waxy mouthfeel that commercial stabilizers produce. Flavors taste like the thing they claim to be. The peach tastes like peach. That sounds like a low bar until you remember how many places clear it.
The shop on West Liberty is small. A display case, a counter, and not much room to linger. On a July Saturday, the line extends past the door. People wait in it willingly. Waffle cones are made in-house. Pints are available if you want to stock the freezer and handle the rotation problem at home.1Blank Slate Creamery pricing and product details per their current menu and in-store visits.
Zingerman's Creamery (3723 Plaza Dr) | Single scoop ~$5, double ~$7
The Creamery is primarily a cheese operation. But the gelato, made in-house from the same Michigan dairy that goes into the cheese, is good enough to justify its own mention. Denser than Blank Slate's ice cream, with a different richness. Toasted Coconut has actual coconut flavor. Chocolate Shovel is dark and intense without bitterness.
Where Blank Slate leans into creative seasonal flavors and a shop atmosphere, the Creamery's gelato feels like an extension of the dairy operation. Less playful, more fundamental. The scoop counter sits in the same retail space as the cheese case, on Plaza Drive, next to the Bakehouse. You walk in for cheese, you notice the gelato, you leave with both. A gelato and a tub of fromage blanc in the same bag is a specific kind of Plaza Drive experience.
Dexter Creamery (8106 Main St, Dexter) | Single ~$4.50, double ~$6
Twenty minutes from downtown Ann Arbor, in the middle of Dexter's Main Street, a small ice cream shop scoops 38 flavors of MOO-ville hard ice cream. MOO-ville, based in Nashville, Michigan, won a national award from the North American Ice Cream Association.2MOO-ville Creamery's national award from the North American Ice Cream Association per the company's own materials and Dexter Creamery's in-store signage. The ice cream is dense, high-butterfat, smooth. Seventeen soft-serve flavors add range.
Dexter Creamery works as the punctuation mark on a downtown Dexter evening. Dinner at 42 North Social House, a walk, then a cone. On summer nights, the line extends out the door. Waffle cones are made in-house. The shop sits between Dexter Brunch House and Dexter's Pub on Main Street. If you're in Dexter for the Cider Mill, a scoop before the drive home is the right call.
The Bakery Desserts
Two bakeries in the area produce pastries good enough to function as standalone dessert destinations.
Zingerman's Bakehouse (3711 Plaza Dr) operates the largest pastry program in the county. Roughly 50 types of bread and pastry rotate through in a given week. The nut-crusted coffee cake has its own following. Rugelach, brownies, and the seasonal pastry specials are all made with the same long-process approach that defines their bread. The Challah on Fridays works as dessert if you eat it with butter and honey, which I do, and I will not apologize for it.
The retail counter at the Bakehouse is open daily. Most people come in for bread and leave with a pastry or three. Prices for individual pastries run $3-$7.
The Lakehouse Bakery (Main St, Chelsea) keeps a smaller case, but the quality is high. The cinnamon rolls on Saturday mornings are the headline item. The cookies are solid. The almond croissant at Espy Cafe (404 W Huron St) also belongs in the conversation, crisp outside and rich inside, though Espy is primarily a coffee roaster rather than a dessert shop.
Restaurant Dessert Programs
This is where the guide gets thinner, and I want to be direct about why. Ann Arbor has excellent restaurants. Many of them serve dessert. Few of them have the kind of dedicated pastry program where the dessert course is a genuine event rather than an obligation.
Mani Osteria (341 E Liberty St) serves a panna cotta that has been on the menu long enough to develop a following. Entrees run $18-$32; desserts around $10-$12. Spencer (113 E Liberty St) runs a tasting menu where the final courses are composed with the same precision as everything that came before, but you're buying the full experience, not ordering dessert a la carte. Entrees at Echelon (200 S Main St) push $30-$50, and the pastry course at the end is considered.
But if you're asking me where to go specifically for dessert, the answer is the ice cream shops and the bakeries. That's where the focus is. That's where the product is the point rather than the epilogue.
What's Missing
Washtenaw Dairy on West Washington has been scooping since the 1930s. It is a nostalgic Ann Arbor institution and the ice cream is fine. Kilwins on Main Street handles the downtown tourist and campus crowd with fudge and chocolate-dipped things. Both serve a purpose. Neither made this list because "fine" and "serves a purpose" are not what I'm trying to point you toward.
A city with this many restaurants should have more dedicated dessert options. A proper patisserie. A chocolate shop beyond the chain model. A late-night dessert bar. The demand is there, especially during football weekends and campus events when the population swells and people look for something to do after dinner. For now, the three creameries and two bakeries carry the load. They carry it well.
Blank Slate's hours are seasonal; check before you go. The Creamery and Bakehouse on Plaza Drive share a parking lot and are open daily. Dexter Creamery is busiest on summer weekends. All of these places are cash-friendly, though Blank Slate and the Bakehouse take cards.