The secret to just about every outstanding dessert is simple: salt. It's the yin to sugar's yang, making sure those dozens of cookies you spent all day baking are balanced and not cloyingly sweet. Salt also enhances the flavors in desserts, like making citrus taste fresher and more pucker-y in a lemon tart, or making cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg more fragrant in a spiced honey cake.
You'll notice that a lot of older recipes, á la The Joy of Cooking (or even vintage Bon Appétit recipes), don't call for much salt. As a general rule of thumb, you can double the amount of salt in any of those classic recipes—don't worry, it won't make it salty, it will just help balance the sweetness and make it the best dessert it can be. (To clarify, we're talking about coarser kosher salt and not superfine table salt. Don't ruin your desserts with the iodized stuff!)
Honestly, you can (and should) finish anything sweet with a sprinkle of flaky Maldon salt. It transforms toffee and chocolate chip cookies into a balanced masterpiece, with the flavor of the chocolate shining through without being cloyingly sweet, complements the slightly salty pistachios in this brittle, and keeps a frosted double-chocolate cake from hitting you over the head with sugar. And obviously we all know how great salted caramel is, whether as a sauce, a candy, or the base of a custard.
Hands down, salted desserts are the best desserts. Full stop. Salting your desserts won't just make your desserts better, though—they'll make you a better person too. It's the one time in life where being salty is a good thing, a quality welcomed by your friends and family. Just don't try to Salt Bae the finishing cookie sprinkle—let's leave that in 2017.