Chocolate truffles are inherently simple confections. These rich, dense balls of ganache often contain nothing more than good-quality bar chocolate and heavy cream. Yet they’re surprisingly difficult to get right. The chocolate-to-cream ratio must be spot-on, and creating a smooth, shiny coating is even more finicky. Our approach produces flawless results for anyone, regardless of their candy-making experience.
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With so few ingredients, lemon ice is regularly plagued by the harsh and unbalanced flavors that often afflict lemon desserts. The way we see it (or taste it), lemon ice should melt on the tongue with abandon, strike a perfect sweet-tart balance, and hit lots of high notes before quickly disappearing without so much as a trace of bitterness.
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Buttermilk biscuits at their best are light, flaky, and irresistibly buttery, but there are many problems that can hinder that result. Learn how we work buttermilk into the dough to ensure tender biscuits, and how we roll the butter to create long thin layers that bake up into impressively flaky layers. See our method on how to roll and stamp the dough. Discover the beauty of baking the biscuits upside down for even baking and consistency in size and browning. This online cooking class will teach you how to bake buttermilk biscuits that are foolproof every time.
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Beignets, the French version of fried dough fritters, reached Louisiana in the 18th century. Today, beignets are the object of desire of every tourist in New Orleans. To replicate the airy, crisp texture and tangy yeast flavor of these classic New Orleans doughnuts, we used a super-hydrated dough, which means lots of steam, which creates an open, honeycombed structure as soon as the beignets hit the hot oil. Learn the steps to our easy Beignet recipe—plus how to avoid common missteps—in this online cooking class.
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Olive-rosemary bread is the most classic variation on a basic rustic loaf. However, you can’t simply add olives to our Rustic Italian Bread. We found it necessary to make several adjustments to the dough to boost the flavor and lower the hydration level. The biggest challenge is keeping the olives in the dough as it is shaped. Many recipes call for adding the olives to the mix, but this just causes the olives to break down and stain the loaf purple or green. The mashed olives also made the loaf heavy and dense. We found it best to add the olives to the already kneaded dough. To ensure even distribution, we found it best to remove the dough from the mixer, pat it into a rectangle, sprinkle the olives over the dough, then roll up the dough like a jelly roll. As dough rises, the olives are evenly dispersed and safely embedded into the loaf so they don’t fall out during the shaping process.
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This recipe has four components: the dough that is shaped into buns, the filling that creates the swirl in the shaped buns, the caramel glaze that bakes in the bottom of the baking dish along with the buns, and the pecan topping that garnishes the buns once baked. To keep the sticky bun glaze from hardening into a taffylike shell, we added cream, which kept the glaze supple. To the dough’s basic mix of flour, yeast, and salt, we added buttermilk, which gave the buns a complex flavor and a little acidity that balanced the sweetness. Butter and eggs enriched the dough further. After the first rise, we spread the filling—brown sugar, cinnamon, cloves, and butter—over the dough, rolled it out, cut the individual buns, and laid them in the pan with the caramel to rise once more before being baked. We found that setting the pan on a baking stone in the oven ensured that the bottoms of the buns (which would end up on top) baked completely. To preserve the crispness of the nuts, we created one more layer: toasted nuts in a lightly sweetened glaze to crown the rolls just before serving.
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This online cooking class teaches all the key components of making various frozen treats, from the science behind avoiding grainy ice cream and sorbet to how to ensure smooth and creamy results. We will focus on key ingredients—including the different types of vanilla and the many shapes of ice cream cones—as well as the right equipment to have on hand. We show you how to make classic toppings, like our recipes for caramel sauce and berry coulis. You’ll also find recipes for homemade vanilla ice cream, as well as raspberry sorbet and lemon ice and how to make chocolate ice cream without an ice cream machine.
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Even the most basic recipes can have pitfalls, and apple pie is one of them—starting with the pie dough. Learn how to avoid soggy pie dough and achieve the perfect flaky texture, good for scores of different pies and other recipes both sweet and savory. We’ll also share tips on how to roll out pie dough and choose the best type of apples for your pie, as well as our picks for the best pie-making equipment. Once you’ve mastered the pie crust (and it won’t take long!), try your hand at three distinct styles of apple pie including our Deep-Dish Apple Pie, Dutch Apple Pie, and Apple-Cranberry Pie.
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Trifles usually look a lot better than they taste because busy cooks simplify the complicated preparation by subbing in pre-made or instant components. In this recipe, we streamline the components so that the entire trifle can be made from scratch in just a few hours.
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Chiffon cake has the height of angel food cake and the richness of pound cake with a rich buttery flavor. This elegant cake is different than standard layer cakes, but classic recipes include lots of time-consuming steps. For our streamlined chiffon cake recipe, we skipped sifting the dry ingredients and used five whole eggs (no wasted whites!). This helped us create a buttery and tender cake that can be served with a variety of toppings, such as whipped cream or fruit. This cooking class will walk you through the best equipment and ingredients for making chiffon cake at home, teach you how to avoid common mistakes that lead to a chiffon cake that doesn’t rise or easily remove from the pan, and then show you how to make light, fluffy chiffon cake with our step-by-step photos.
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Double-crust pies, such as apple pies, are made by layering the filling between two pieces of raw dough and then baking the pie until the crust is crisp and the filling is tender. Single-crust pies, such as pecan pie, start with a pie shell, which is often prebaked. The pie shell is filled and then baked just long enough until the sweet, egg-enriched filling is set. (Although it may not look like it, pecan pie and pumpkin pie are really custard pies.) Pecan pies can be overwhelmingly sweet, with no real pecan flavor. And they too often turn out curdled and separated. What’s more, the weepy filling makes the bottom crust soggy and leathery. The fact that the crust usually seems underbaked to begin with doesn’t help matters. We created a recipe for a not-too-sweet pie with a smooth-textured filling and a properly baked bottom crust.
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Cookies are an important part of the holidays for many families. Unlike the simpler chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies that bakers prepare during the rest of the year, holiday cookies are often a bit more involved. Rolling and cutting thin sheets of dough can yield more attractive cookies, but it can also produce a lot of challenges. In this cooking class, we will review all the basic techniques that guarantee success when baking holiday cookies, such as glazed sugar cookies. We will learn how to prepare classic holiday cut-out cookies that you can decorate as well as elegant French butter cookies, old-fashioned gingerbread, and super-easy nut crescents rolled in powdered sugar.
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