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Small Batch Baking

Small batch baking is for those times when you want just enough for a few people or to satisfy a sweet tooth, without the leftovers or mess of a standard-sized recipe. Most leftover baked goods stale quickly, leaving you with sub-par sweets or wasted food. Our solution: creating recipes for our favorite baked goods in perfectly proportioned small batches. These scaled down recipes come together quickly and usually bake up faster than a full batch. In other words, small batch baking is time-saving, space-saving, and clean-up friendly.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Chocolate Chip Cookies

A chocolate chip cookie is no more than a drop cookie that contains chocolate morsels. Sounds simple enough, but this wildly popular cookie has evolved over the years to accommodate different tastes (thin and crisp versus chewy or cakey) and diets (low sugar or naturally sweet, vegan). In this course, we'll break down cookie science and explain how you can manipulate basic ingredients like flour, sugar, eggs, butter, and leaveners to achieve the cookie you want. You’ll learn the role that sugar plays in cookie recipes, as well as how to work with butter to achieve the perfect cookie flavor and texture. And you'll discover new sets of ingredients to make a chewy, moist vegan cookie, as well as a lower-sugar chocolate chip cookie with all the sweetness and flavors you crave. No matter your preference, rest assured there is a knockout chocolate chip cookie in your future. In this course you will learn how to make recipes for Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies, Thin and Crispy Chocolate Chip Cookies, Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies, and Naturally Sweet Chocolate Chip Cookies.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Ultimate Apple-Cranberry Pie

This beautiful pie replaces some of the apple filling with a layer of cooked, sweetened cranberries. This recipe uses the pie dough from the Foolproof Pie Dough recipe. If you haven’t already done so, you’ll need to make the pie dough. To keep the cranberries from overwhelming the apples, we actually create two fillings and layer them into the pie shell one on top of the other for a stunning final presentation. As with our Deep-Dish Apple Pie, we found it best to precook the apples. Since we needed to cook the cranberry filling as well, we decide to simplify the apple filling a bit. We found we could handle the smaller quantity of apples used in this recipe in the microwave. And to skip the tedious draining step, we added a bit of cornstarch. Finally, we found that all sweet apples were a good foil to the tart cranberry layer. To simplify work on this project recipe, you can prepare the two fillings in advance and keep them in separate containers in the refrigerator for up to 2 days. Likewise, the dough can be made in advance, so that all you need to do on serving day is roll out the dough, assemble the pie, and bake.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Caramel-Espresso Yule Log

Few desserts shout “Holidays” like a Yule log. It’s not only one of the oldest finales to a Christmas feast, but also a dessert with a huge “wow” factor: a moist, tender cake rolled around a rich, creamy filling; coated in frosting; and adorned with playful woodsy garnishes. In this course you will learn to make the ultimate show-stopping dessert—our Caramel-Espresso Yule Log with Meringue Bracket-Style Mushrooms and Chocolate Crumbles. We will show you how to bake and fill a chiffon cake, make a caramel-espresso filling, and create a chocolate ganache “bark.” You will also learn to make Yule log “dirt” crumbles and bracket-style meringue mushrooms.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Slab Pies to Feed a Crowd

In this course, you will learn how to create farm-fresh pies for a crowd using our simple slab pie method. By the end of this course, you understand the basics of how to transform our buttery pie dough into a bottom crust that fits a half-sized sheet pan. We will give you tips on how to increase the ingredients to have the perfect amount of filling, and give you options for different toppings like lattice top, cut-outs, or crumb topping. We’ll show you how to make the most of your fresh fruit in our recipes for Peach Slab Pie, Pear Butterscotch Slab Pie, and Triple Berry Slab Pie.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Chocolate-Espresso Dacquoise

This showstopper of a chocolate dessert is all sleek planes and clean right angles, elegantly enrobed in glossy dark chocolate studded with toasted nuts. Slicing it reveals a layered interior of light, nutty meringue sandwiched with silky buttercream. The problem is that it’s also a project piece, so you rarely see it in home kitchens. Our dacquoise is not just easier than a professional-bakery version—it’s better.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Easy No-Churn Ice Cream and Frozen Custard

We’re showcasing three delicious recipes for creamy, frozen treats that all have one thing in common: no ice cream machine necessary. We have chosen these recipes for their straightforward methods using common household appliances, as well as their great flavor. In each of these recipes you will learn a different technique that can be used to make countless variations. We will show you how to make a creamy Old-Fashioned Vanilla Frozen Custard using a stand mixer to incorporate air before freezing, Mint-Cookie No-Churn Ice Cream using a blender, and No-Fuss Banana Ice Cream that uses a food processor and contains nothing more than bananas, heavy cream, and flavorings...with no added sugar!

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  • Baking & Desserts

Authentic Baguettes

For a homemade baguette recipe that rivals the best from Parisian boulangeries, we took a trip to France to learn firsthand what it takes. The problem with most baguette recipes, we discovered, is that all the small details that matter are glossed over. That includes the wheaty flavor, which is prevalent in French baguettes but usually missing from American bakeries' versions, and getting that crispy, crackly crust that is the mark of a good baguette. The secret? Knowing how to shape the baguette and using a long, slow rise in the refrigerator, which delivers the complex flavor of fermentation while making the recipe easy and flexible.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Cobblers, Crisps, and Crumbles

Fruit cobblers, crumbles, and crisps may be easy-to-throw-together desserts but that doesn’t make them foolproof. With the cost of fresh fruit skyrocketing, we want to ensure that you produce the best fruit desserts. In this online cooking class, we’ll review the vast array of simple fruit desserts—some with names you may have never heard of. You’ll learn how to buy, store, and care for fresh berries, stone fruit, and apples, as well as how to know when frozen makes more sense than fresh. Our core technique videos are all about fruit prep. We’ll show you how to peel and pit peaches—whether one or a whole bushel—as well as how to prep apples for baking. Finally, you’ll bake three classic fruit desserts that celebrate (not mask) the full, deep flavor of blueberries, peaches, and apples.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Ultimate Chocolate Desserts

There is much to know about working with chocolate, like how to buy it, how to work with it, the science behind it, and what is the best chocolate available. In this America’s Test Kitchen online cooking class, we will walk you through all there is to know about chocolate in order to make the ultimate chocolate desserts. Our core technique videos outline in clear terms how to properly whip egg whites, and melt chocolate two ways (on the stovetop and in the microwave) to avoid seizing. Learn what common pitfalls to avoid when working with chocolate, and what equipment and ingredients make creating these impressive desserts easier. Finally, try our recipes for Triple-Chocolate Mousse Cake, Rich Chocolate Tart, and our Chocolate-Espresso Dacquoise.

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  • Baking & Desserts

French Butter Cookies

During the holidays, French butter cookies offer sophistication and style from simple pantry ingredients. That is, if you can capture their elusive sandy texture (sablé is French for sandy). Most of the recipes we came across had only slight differences in ingredient proportions, but they all baked up without the delicate crumbliness that defines this cookie. To create the hallmark sandy texture of sablés—light, with an inviting granular texture similar to shortbread—we did some detective work. Let us show you what we learned and how to adapt this recipe to make other holiday cookie recipes.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Authentic Pizza

Americans have adopted Italian pizza as their own. While Americans heavily load the pizza with toppings, to Italians it is as much about the pizza dough as it is about the toppings. The challenge for American cooks is creating an authentic crust in a home oven—not a wood-fired pizza oven that reaches temperatures in excess of 800 degrees. In this cooking class, we’ll cover some basics that include working with yeast, coaxing the most flavor from the dough, and reviewing techniques for shaping and topping pizza. You will then learn to prepare both thin-crust and deep-dish pizza that rivals anything you can get in Italy.

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