baking and desserts

  • Home
  • Cooking Classes
image
  • Baking & Desserts

Croissants

Butter, flour, sugar: the ingredient list for croissants is very short, but many home bakers are intimidated by the process of preparing these pastry recipes at home. The layered structure that characterizes croissants is formed through a process called lamination. What is lamination? The method can vary slightly depending on the recipe and the pastry you're making, but generally lamination happens when a lean yeasted dough is wrapped around a block of butter. The package is rolled out and folded repeatedly to form paper-thin layers of dough separated by even thinner layers of butter. As the pastry bakes, the steam separates the layers, creating rise. The result is a flaky, buttery pastry that almost melts in your mouth. In this online course, you'll learn how to bake croissants at home. This recipe makes extra croissants that can be frozen, so you can always have croissants on hand.

Book Now
image
  • Baking & Desserts

Dutch Apple Pie

Dutch apple pie has three distinct components—flaky pie crust, creamy apple filling (usually enhanced with dried fruit), and buttery, crunchy streusel. This recipe use a prebaked pie shell made with our Foolproof Pie Dough recipe. If you haven’t already done so, you’ll need to make the pie dough. A mix of tart and sweet apples produced the best flavor and, as with our Deep-Dish Apple Pie, we found it best to precook the apples. Most recipes simply layer the apples into a prebaked shell and then drizzle the cream on top before adding the streusel. We found that cooking the cream on the stovetop prevented it from curdling in the oven. A touch of cornmeal gives our brown sugar streusel a welcome crunch.

Book Now
image
  • Baking & Desserts

Gluten-Free Blueberry Pie

Perfect pie dough has just the right balance of tenderness and structure. The former comes from fat, the latter from the long protein chains, called gluten, that form when flour mixes with water. Too little gluten and the dough won’t stick together; too much and the crust turns tough. So presumably we would face mostly a structural issue with a gluten-free dough, since gluten-free flours are naturally low in protein. Although we weren’t surprised to find that the dough was still too soft and lacked structure, we were taken aback by how tough it was. This online class will teach you everything you need to know about how to make a flaky, tender, and crisp pie crust that also happens to be gluten-free.

Book Now
image
  • Baking & Desserts

Breads for Brunch

The aroma of a fresh, warm loaf of bread wafting through your kitchen is one of the best smells there is. But baking bread at home can intimidate even the most confident baker, and there's a certain magic to turning a lump of dough into a soft, flavorful loaf. How do you knead bread? What are the different types and uses for yeast? What are enriched breads? In this online cooking class, we will teach you everything you need to know to prepare sweet, yeasted breads that make the perfect addition to your brunch menu, including our recipes for three of them: Cinnamon Swirl Bread, Chocolate Babka, and No-Knead Brioche.

Book Now
image
  • Baking & Desserts

New York Thin-Crust Pizza

Looking for the best New York thin-crust pizza? Look no further than this online cooking class. You will discover how to make pizza dough from scratch using instant yeast. We like to use bread flour in this recipe, because the higher protein content makes the dough chewy and flavorful. Understand when it’s the right time to add salt to your pizza dough, and how to develop flavor in your dough for a great tasting crust. You will understand how easy a simple pizza sauce is to make, and why you should resist putting too much cheese on your pizza. We will share with you what mistakes we made in the test kitchen so you can avoid them. By the end of this class you will have the information and tips you need to turn out great tasting thin-crust pizzas from scratch.

Book Now
image
  • Baking & Desserts

Deep-Dish Apple Pie

Good apple pie begins with great pie dough that's easy to make and handle. This recipe uses the pie dough from the Foolproof Pie Dough recipe. This apple pie starts with cooked (rather than raw) apples. When raw apples are used in a pie, they shrink to almost nothing, leaving a huge gap between the top crust and filling. Precooking the apples eliminates the shrinking problem and actually helps the apples hold their shape once baked in the pie. This probably seems counterintuitive, but here's what happens: When the apples are gently heated, their pectin is converted to a heat-stable form that prevents the apples from becoming mushy when cooked further in the oven. It is best to gently heat the apples and seasonings in a large covered Dutch oven. Cooling the apples before putting them in the pie crust is essential so that the butter in the crust doesn't melt immediately. Finally, we drain almost all of the juice from the apples (reserving just ¼ cup) to ensure a perfectly juicy and moist, but not soupy, apple pie, worth of your Thanksgiving table.

Book Now
image
  • Baking & Desserts

Nut Crescents

Nut crescents (also known as Viennese crescent, butterballs, and Mexican wedding cakes) do not get the respect they deserve. Often the first to be tossed out in a pile of leftover Christmas cookies, they appear stale, dry, floury, and flavorless, except perhaps for a pasty layer of melting confectioners' sugar. But when these cookies are well made, they can be delicious: buttery, nutty, slightly crisp, slightly crumbly, with a melt-in-your mouth quality. We wanted to develop a recipe that would put them back in their proper place, as the perfect accompaniment to a cup of coffee or tea.

Book Now
image
  • Baking & Desserts

Kouign-Amann

Kouign-amann originated more than a century ago in Brittany, where it was made with leftover bread dough that was layered with local salted butter and sugar to create a rich, caramelized cake. (Kouign means “butter” and amann means “cake” in Breton.) Contemporary bakers have created a flaky caramel-crusted interpretation that has taken the pastry world by storm. Our goal was to come up with a clear, straightforward method to prepare these exquisite pastries. The process is similar to that of making croissants, where butter is folded and rolled into yeasted dough in “turns.” Our challenge was to determine the best method for incorporating the sugar so that it would produce a delicate caramel crust without burning. We achieved the best texture when we first completed two turns of dough with only butter, followed by two turns in which we incorporated sugar; this ensured that the sugar didn’t puncture our dough and compromise the pastry’s distinct layers. To work the sugar into the layers, we dusted the counter and the dough with it, as we would with flour, when we rolled out the dough. As we shaped individual dough pieces into bundles, we gave them a fine coating of sugar. And, finally, we sprinkled sugar and sea salt over the tops before baking. Many bakeries use ring molds to shape individual kouign-amann, but we scaled our recipe to fit into a 12-cup muffin pan.

Book Now
image
  • Baking & Desserts

Pumpkin Pie

Although it may not look like it, pumpkin pie is actually a custard pie. A prebaked pie shell is filled and then baked just long enough for the sweet, egg-enriched filling to set. We wanted to create a pumpkin pie with a velvety smooth filling packed with pumpkin flavor and redolent of just enough fragrant spices. We cook the canned pumpkin with sugar and spices, then whisk in remaining ingredients. This pie is best served, with whipped cream, the day it is baked, although once cooled it can be refrigerated for a day.

Book Now
image
  • Baking & Desserts

Icebox Key Lime Pie

For a take on this classic Icebox Key Lime Pie that didn't rely on raw egg yolks, we used a combination of instant vanilla pudding, gelatin, and cream cheese whipped together in the food processor with the usual lime juice and condensed milk to thicken our no-cook pie's filling to a perfect, smooth consistency. A full cup of fresh lime juice produced a pie with bracing lime flavor. Lime zest added another layer of flavor, and processing the zest with a little sugar offset its sourness and eliminated the annoying chewy bits.

Book Now
image
  • Baking & Desserts

No-Knead Brioche

Well-made brioche is something of a miracle: Despite being laden with butter and eggs, it manages to avoid the density of a pound cake and turn out incredibly light and airy. But achieving these results is a balancing act—and a tricky one at that. Traditionally, making a rich dough like brioche means kneading all of the ingredients to develop gluten—except butter. Softened butter is added tablespoon by tablespoon only after the mixture begins to develop into dough. This long process is important: If the butter isn't added slowly, the dough can bread into a greasy mess. We decided to ditch tradition and use a "no-knead" technique, which also solved our tricky butter problem. In a no-knead approach, the dough (which must be very wet) sits for a long time, stitching itself together to form gluten—all without any help from a mixer. With kneading out of the equation, we are able to melt the butter and add it all at one—a faster and far less demanding approach.

Book Now
image
  • Baking & Desserts

Icebox Pies

Icebox pies get their name from the icebox where they were traditionally kept cool. These classic Southern recipes were traditionally easy and no-cook, which was a relief in the heat of summer. Although traditionally made with raw eggs, a no-no in many modern pie recipes, we have adapted our recipes for these classics in order to avoid eating raw eggs. In each of the desserts, you only need to turn on the oven to bake the crust. This course will teach you how to blind bake a traditional pie crust, how to prepare a graham cracker crust, how to make stove-top custard, and how to identify ingredients, equipment, and techniques for a variety of icebox pies. These pies can be made up to a day in advance, so they make a great addition to a summer gathering or picnic.

Book Now
2 3 4 5 6