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Gingersnaps

Most gingersnap recipes don’t live up to their name. Once you get past their brittle edges, the cookies turn soft and chewy. And they always fall short on flavor, lacking sufficiently bold notes of ginger and spice. The biggest obstacle in achieving their signature snap is too much moisture. We fixed the texture and boosted the flavor in our make-ahead recipe, which can be prepared days (or even weeks) in advance. In this online cooking class, you will learn the keys to our recipe, the best equipment to use to make them, and how to avoid common cookie pitfalls.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Foolproof Holiday Cookies

We found the secret to perfecting this classic cookie recipe. And, even better, the wrapped disks of dough can be refrigerated for up to three days or frozen for up to one month, so you can get a jump start on holiday baking. And since this versatile dough can be used to make a variety of cookies, you can use it to turn out a full holiday cookie spread.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Cheese Soufflé

Soufflés can be real show stoppers, but they have a reputation for being difficult to prepare and temperamental in the oven. In reality a soufflé is quite simple to execute. In this online cooking class, you will learn the key to making a stable soufflé which takes the failure rate to an all-time low. Learn the secrets behind the method for perfect cheese soufflé, including how to make a roux and béchamel sauce, as well as how to prepare your baking dish in order to get the greatest height from your soufflé. We’ll cover which equipment is best for this recipe and what ingredients can be substituted (and just as important, which ones should not). Master this recipe and have the confidence to serve it as a main course at your next dinner party!

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  • Baking & Desserts

New York Cheesecake

The ideal New York Cheesecake should be tall, bronzed, and dense with satiny, sweet, tangy cream. Unfortunately, there are far too many recipes that miss the mark and result in rubbery or leaden cakes and lackluster flavor. In this online cooking class, learn what New York style cheesecake is. Discover an easy method of baking this cheesecake that does not involve a water bath, and understand when it’s done. We’ll take you through some basic steps to a graham cracker crust that bakes up crisp and buttery. And learn how to avoid the most common mistakes that cooks make when it comes to cheesecake—a cracked top. Finally, try our recipe for Fresh Strawberry Topping to pair with your cheesecake.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Cinnamon Swirl Bread

Is there any smell better than cinnamon swirl bread baked from scratch? It’s so good that many bakers have been known to cut into it before it’s fully cooled. In this online cooking course, learn what kind of dough is right to give lift to the swirl running through it for great height and flavor. We’ll teach you the best way to form and roll the dough to get the perfect swirl. And you’ll soon discover the right balance of sweet and spice for this style bread. You’ll learn how to avoid common mistakes, like how to ensure the raisins are evenly distributed, as well as what equipment to use. We’ll take the guesswork out of this recipe by walking you through the entire process step-by-step in our video and photo tutorials.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Peach Pie

While the almost-impossible juiciness of a ripe peach is the source of the fruit’s magnificence, it’s also the reason that fresh peaches can be tricky to use in pies. In addition to fresh fruit flavor, ripe peaches exude so much juice that they require an excess of flavor-dampening binders to create a filling that isn’t soup. Our recipe brings the best out of peaches without the soggy crust and grainy filling that often plague these pies.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Latin Flan

Latin American flan should be a dense but creamy custard, but the high-protein canned milks that recipes call for can make it rubbery. It can also bake unevenly, and the caramel tends to stick to the pan rather than pour out when you unmold the custard. To ensure even baking, we bake our flan at a low temperature, covered to keep any skin from forming. We also use a combination of canned and just a little fresh milk to produce a custard with a creamy but sturdy texture. Finally, an overnight rest and adding extra water to the finished caramel allows the release of plenty of caramel sauce.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Triple-Chocolate Mousse Cake

Triple chocolate mousse cake is a truly decadent dessert. Most times, though, the mousse texture is exactly the same from one layer to the next and the flavor is so overpoweringly rich it’s hard to finish more than a few forkfuls. We set out to tweak this showy confection. By finessing one layer at a time, starting with the dark chocolate base and building to the top white chocolate tier, we aimed to create a triple-decker that was incrementally lighter in texture—and richness.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Palmiers

Whether you call them palmiers (à la francaise), elephant ears, butterflies, pig's ears, Prussians, or angel wings, they are all the same: flat heart-shaped sheets of coiled puff pastry coated thickly with a crunchy glaze. The best are crisp and lightly caramelized, tasting of nothing but pure butter, browned wheat, and golden sugar. Forming the cookies isn't hard, but making the puff pastry does take some time: An elastic dough is wrapped tightly around a thin sheet of butter and folded time and time again, which exponentially develops alternating layers of dough and butter. When baked, the moisture in the butter converts into steam, causing the layers of dough to puff and separate into flaky sheets. That said, as long as you chill the dough between turns and follow the directions, the long process isn't difficult.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Fresh Fruit Tart

A fresh fruit tart is the showpiece of a bakery pastry case–and for good reason. With its clean crust edge and ornate arrangement of fruit glistening with glaze, this dessert is beautiful and conveys a sense of occasion. But anyone who has served one knows that the pretty presentation literally falls apart when the knife meets the tart. Instead of neat wedges, you get shards of pastry oozing messy fruit and juice-stained filling. That’s a disappointing end for a dessert that started out looking so impressive and required several hours to make. By trading the traditional rolled pastry and pastry cream filling for easier, faster alternatives, we produced a fresh fruit tart that is as easy to make but still impressive and delicious to serve.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Bread Stuffing with Fresh Herbs

Few side dishes are more classic at Thanksgiving than bread stuffing. And few holidays put more use to your oven! Since Thanksgiving can be hectic enough, our stuffing recipe allows you to prepare the stuffing up to two days in advance and only have to bake it in the oven on the day it is to be served. Since it can be difficult to safely cook stuffing inside of a turkey, we cook it outside of the bird, in a baking dish. Covering the stuffing with foil during cooking steams it, mimicking the moist cooking conditions inside a turkey. For a crisp crust and toasty flavor, we remove the foil for the last 20 minutes of baking. Learn all the tricks to our classic stuffing in this online cooking class.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Refined Strawberry Shortcake

Plenty of juicy, sweet berries and whipped cream are a must for strawberry shortcake, but what about the shortcake itself? Some versions opt for biscuits, others for cake. In this class, you’ll learn how to make a light, fluffy genoise sponge cake, perfectly suited to soaking up the berry juice. This recipe features two pounds of fresh strawberries and a flavorful cake that doesn’t fall apart when soaked with the juice. Together, they make a cake that’s elegant and refined. The sponge cake’s structure is dependent on egg proteins versus the weaker gluten proteins of a butter cake, making it better able to absorb the berries’ juice without breaking down. To balance the sweetness, we add lemon zest to the cake’s batter and lemon juice to the berries. Follow our recipe and you’ll end up with a cake that looks elegant and slices easily, and slices that contain the perfect bite of fresh strawberries, light-as-air cake, and tangy whipped cream.

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