Stuck at Home, Pastry Chefs Find Freedom. New Yorkers Find Cookies.

Joy Cho was shopping with her mother in a Williams Sonoma store when a display of miniature Bundt pans caught her eye. A pastry cook at Gramercy Tavern until the pandemic came, she bought them. This was early January.

The next day, she began composing a sour-cream batter recipe and experimenting with glazes flavored with milk tea, black sesame and other ingredients. By Feb. 1, she was taking orders on her website for boxes of six two-inch Bundts, which could be picked up at her home in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. An initial batch of what she calls “gem cakes” sold out. So did a second batch.

Ms. Cho’s one-woman cake company, Joy Cho Pastry, is a model of the new businesses founded by New York City bakers and pastry chefs who have been put out of work by the pandemic. Like hers, these seat-of-the-pants operations are nimble, adaptable, highly creative and tiny.

Taking advantage of a state licensing exemption that allows “home processors” to sell baked goods and certain other foods with minimal oversight, most of them use consumer-grade ovens and refrigerators in their apartments, supplemented, perhaps, by a utility shelf or a makeshift work table propped up on sawhorses.

What emerges from these improvised kitchens is a wealth of muffins, scones and shortbreads; brownies with a swirl of tahini and blondies with a bite of candied ginger; classic tarts and tortes; Rice Krispies treats augmented with brown butter or matcha; cupcakes, croissants, rosewater-scented North African-style ghriba cookies, and breads in forms both recognizable and previously unknown.

With the normal barriers to starting a business gone and the usual pressures of the marketplace scrambled, a wonderful, desperate creativity has flourished. It may not last. But for now, these professionals working in amateur kitchens are exploring their medium to see where it can take them.

Almost none of these microbakeries have a retail storefront. Some bakers, like Ms. Cho, hand over bags or boxes to masked customers who ring their apartment bell. Others make socially distanced home deliveries. One way or the other, they get their handiwork into the homes of a populace hungry for the particular pleasures of food whose chief aim is delight.

The past few years in New York City have not been kind to the pastry sciences. Instagram, with its power to anoint a new Cronut at any moment, has bewitched talented people into devoting their careers to the pursuit of edible memes. In restaurants, desserts that make expressive, creative use of the medium are becoming rare, replaced by ones that are easily made and assembled and don’t alienate anybody — sundaes with crunchy bits, and so on.

Menus have focused on getting diners to order a blitz of small plates at the start of the meal. After such an onslaught, few people have the energy or the room left for anything more than a shared pudding. (“One panna cotta with four spoons, then?”) Many restaurants have decided that a full-time salary isn’t justified by what customers are willing to pay for dessert.

If pastry chefs have learned anything in the pandemic, it’s that a sizable audience is out there, eager to try whatever they dream up next.

“What we’ve seen in the last year is, obviously there’s a demand for dessert,” said Kelly Miao, who has worked in the pastry departments of Bar Boulud and Dominique Ansel Kitchen. “I’m not sure why restaurants don’t highlight it more, because there’s so much to offer. Desserts can be extraordinary, but they don’t give them the chance to shine.”

Ms. Miao, 27, had left restaurants before the pandemic and was working a stall at the Bronx Night Market, trying to get a business called Chi Desserts off the ground. But she never came up with a head-swiveling product that persuaded the crowds to stop, taste and buy.

Once it became clear there would be no night markets this year, she reinvented Chi as Kemi Dessert Bar, fashioning sweets in her apartment in Jamaica, Queens, and making home deliveries. The change has given her imagination room to roam.

“I have more opportunity to let my skills show” than at the night market, she said. Ms. Miao, who is Chinese-American, said working for herself also allowed her to draw on flavors that express her Asian heritage but that would have been out of step at the French or Italian restaurants where she used to work.

She makes stratified verrines in plastic cups, with contrasting layers of tart passion-fruit mousse, calming coconut Chantilly and raspberry gelée over baked meringue. Her Thai-tea custard buns reliably sell out, and demand is mounting for Kemi Cubes, which are moist, glazed cakes about the size of the carved ice cubes that a Japanese cocktail bar would deposit in an old-fashioned. In one iteration, she cloaked marble poundcake cubes in vanilla and chocolate icings borrowed from black-and-white cookies.

“I’ve never been able to be this creative in my life,” she said. “I feel really proud of…