baking and desserts

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Doughnuts and Coffee

Doughnuts and coffee are a classic breakfast combination, but it's disappointing when you get a stale, flat doughnut or a weak cup of coffee. Making doughnuts at home can be a fun challenge for someone who bakes bread, since doughnut dough is simply enriched bread dough. In this cooking class, you will learn how to make yeasted doughnuts, New Orleans beignets, and Italian-American zeppoles. Each of these recipes requires knowing how to deep fry, so we will walk you through the step-by-step and review safety tips. When deep-frying, it's important to keep an eye on the oil temperature and adjust the heat as you fry. If the oil isn't hot enough, the doughnuts will absorb a lot of oil and become soggy; if the oil is too hot, the exterior of the doughnuts will cook before the insides are done. In this cooking class you will also learn how to make a great cup of coffee. This class covers a few types of brewing methods. Cold brewing requires steeping the coffee grounds in water overnight, but the result is a smooth, less acidic coffee. We will also show you how to make pour-over coffee and coffee in a French press. The benefit to making your own coffee at home is that you can adjust the strength and roast to your tastes. Our recommended amount of coffee is 2 tablespoons per cup, but how much coffee you add really depends on how strong you like it.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Blueberry Cobbler with Biscuit Topping

We wanted the best, balanced blueberry cobbler recipe with a not-too-thin, not-too-thick filling where the fruit flavor would be front and center. And over the berries we wanted a light, tender biscuit topping that could hold its own against the fruit filling, with an ingredient list simple enough to allow the blueberries to play the starring role. Learn each of the steps to our surprisingly easy recipe for Blueberry Cobbler—as well as how to prevent missteps like soupy cobbler—in this online cooking class.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Rich Chocolate Tart

The real draw of a chocolate tart is its pure, uncomplicated profile: a flawlessly smooth, truffle-like texture; unadulterated chocolate flavor; and a sophisticated polish. This holiday-caliber dessert can be flavored with vanilla, cognac, or other liquor and served with whipped cream. We’ll walk you through every step and help you avoid common pitfalls that can turn this rich dessert into a disappointment.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie

Strawberries and rhubarb have been paired together for so long that we think of them as a great match. Except that they’re not. Both are loaded with water (92 and 95 percent water by weight, respectively). When the two are enclosed in pastry and baked, that water heats up and causes both to soften dramatically, albeit differently: Rhubarb often blows out completely, releasing all that moisture into the filling and collapsing into mush, while strawberries remain intact but become unappealingly bloated. Our task was to bring together delicately sweet strawberries and bracingly tart rhubarb in a bright-tasting filling that gels softly and contains plenty of intact fruit and vegetable pieces.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Chocolate Babka

Chocolate babka is made from a rich, tender dough that is similar to brioche or challah bread. The dough is swirled with rich dark chocolate, resulting in a delicious treat for breakfast or brunch. In this online cooking class, we will show you how to bake this New York City favorite at home. The bread's richness comes from butter and egg yolks. The filling is made from a combination of bittersweet chocolate and cocoa powder, which creates full chocolate flavor and a fudgy texture. Our instructor will walk you through how to shape and swirl the bread so that it looks beautiful when you slice into it.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Gluten-Free Chewy Sugar Cookies

Thick, chewy sugar cookies typically rely on just a handful of ingredients—granulated sugar, flour, butter, leavener, and eggs. So when we plugged our flour blend into our favorite recipe, we weren’t surprised to find the gluten-free flour’s starchy flavor and mouthfeel to be far too noticeable. Plus, these cookies were greasy and stale-tasting, and they spread too much. That wasn't going to cut it in the test kitchen. We solved all these problems and made gluten-free sugar cookies that will rival traditional cookies. Learn how to make the recipe in this cooking class.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Raspberry Sorbet

A well-made sorbet is almost as creamy and smooth as its dairy-based relative, but rather than finishing with mouth-coating richness, it should be delicately icy and dissolve on the tongue, leaving behind an echo of clean, concentrated fruit flavor. Our recipe for Raspberry Sorbet uses a trick to prevent iciness, will teach you the perfect churning time, and the best sugar and liquid ratio.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Classic Crème Brûlée

Most brûlées suffer from a trio of problems: The temperature is tepid, not cold; the custard is leaden, not ethereal; and the flavors are tired. A proper brûlée should have a crackly bittersweet sugar crust over a chilly custard of balanced egginess, creaminess, and sweetness; the perfect balance of temperature, texture, and taste. With a lot of testing, we discovered the keys to the perfect–and surprisingly easy–classic crème brûlée recipe: lots of yolks for richness, turbinado sugar for a crunchy crust, an instant-read thermometer for judging the custard’s doneness (with instructions for how to adapt cook time based on the shape and size of your ramekins), and a final chill for the best texture. In addition to all the steps to our recipe, you will learn how to avoid common crème brûlée mistakes like an undercooked custard or curdled yolks.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Ultimate Banana Bread

Our ideal banana bread is simple enough—a moist, tender loaf that really tastes like bananas. We discovered that doubling the dose of bananas in our favorite test recipe was both a blessing and a curse. The abundance of fruit makes for intense banana flavor, but the weight and moisture makes the loaf very heavy. Looking to add banana flavor without moisture, we place our bananas in a glass bowl and microwave them for a few minutes, then transfer the fruit to a strainer to drain. We simmer the exuded banana liquid in a saucepan until it is reduced, then incorporate it into the batter.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Fluffy Omelet

The fluffy omelet is not exactly the new kid on the block, but next to a refined French omelet and a hearty diner omelet, it often gets ignored. In this online cooking class, you’ll learn how to make a perfect fluffy omelet and transform the ordinary egg into this light-as-air dish. You will discover how we create the height with the curds that gives this omelet its name, and see how separating the yolks from the whites ensure the right texture. Find out which pan is just right for this omelet, as well as other useful equipment. Finally, we will guide you to some delicious fillings that will turn this simple omelet into a meal.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Skillet Apple Crisp

Some consider apple crisp to be the perfect dessert, after all, it comes together in minutes, and as it bakes up it fills the whole house with good aroma. But as with any crisp that starts with raw fruit, there are oftentimes problems like unevenly cooked fruit and lackluster flavor – it’s just unpredictable. We wanted to create an apple crisp that ensured perfectly cooked fruit without having to use every pan in the house, so we turned to our trusty skillet. In this online cooking class, discover what types of apples create the best flavor for our apple crisp, and how we amp up the apple flavor. Swapping out some of the flour in the topping for oats creates a crispy crust with better flavor and texture. This skillet apple crisp starts on the stovetop and moves to the oven for a perfectly cooked apple crisp every time.

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  • Baking & Desserts

Ultimate Chocolate Cupcakes

We started by making cupcakes using our favorite chocolate cake recipe. Tasters liked the real chocolate flavor, but their crumbly texture made them impossible to eat without a fork. To strengthen the batter we cut back on both kinds of chocolate, then we found two ways to enhance the chocolate flavor without disrupting the batter’s structure: we mixed the cocoa with hot coffee, and we replaced the butter with more neutral-flavored vegetable oil. Still, we wanted more chocolate flavor. Could we enhance the structure of the cupcake so that we could then add back extra chocolate without overtenderizing? Substituting bread flour for all-purpose flour did the trick. Specifically engineered for gluten development, bread flour turned out a cupcake that was markedly less crumble-prone, but not tough.

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