Serves 18 to 20

We prefer an 18 by 13-inch nonstick baking sheet for this pie. If using a conventional baking sheet, coat it lightly with cooking spray. You will need 4 ounces of animal crackers.

WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
Unlike a traditional apple pie, a slab pie is prepared in a baking sheet and can feed up to 20 people. Its filling is thickened to ensure neat slicing, and it’s topped with a sugary glaze. But rolling out the dough to cover both the bottom and top of this mammoth pie proved problematic, as was making the filling thick enough to hold up to slicing. To avoid these challenges, we used store-bought crusts for our Apple Slab Pie recipe, which proved sturdier than homemade. Gluing two crusts together with water and then rolling the dough into a large rectangle allowed us to get the crust into the large pan without a tear. To improve the bland flavor of the pie crust, we rolled it in crushed animal crackers, which contributed a sweet and buttery flavor to the crust of our Apple Slab Pie. Flour helped thicken our apple filling, but the result was too pasty. Cornstarch made the filling slimy, but tapioca thickened it well without making it starchy.

http://www.americastestkitchenfeed.com/bake-it-better/2013/01/secrets-to-apple-slab-pie/

MAKES ABOUT 24 TWO-INCH PUFFS

A serving of profiteroles consists of three baked puffs filled with ice cream and topped with sauce. This recipe makes 24 puffs, technically enough to serve 8, but inevitably a few bake up too awkwardly shaped to serve to guests.

WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
To develop a perfect profiteroles recipe—for a crisp, tender, and airy pastry encasing cold, creamy ice cream and napped by dark, luxurious chocolate sauce—we began with the pastry, using both milk and water for puffs that were crisp and browned nicely. We used the powerful food processor to incorporate whole eggs into the choux paste and baked the puffs on an uncrowded baking sheet to keep them from collapsing. We slit the baked puffs to release steam and then returned them to the oven for 45 minutes to ensure crispness.

http://www.americastestkitchenfeed.com/bake-it-better/2013/01/secrets-to-profiteroles/

MAKES 1 1/2 CUPS

Whisk the sauce gently so as not to create tiny air bubbles that can mar its appearance.

WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
For the best bittersweet chocolate sauce recipe—flavorful and rich with just the right consistency—we added corn syrup to a mixture of cream and butter, giving our smooth sauce a shiny finish. In our chocolate sauce recipe, we used bittersweet chocolate rather than cocoa or semisweet chocolate for a complex sauce that fell off the spoon in deep chocolate ribbons.

SERVES 6

For profiteroles, the smooth, dense texture and rich flavor of a high-quality custard-style ice cream is preferable to the light, fluffy texture and milky flavor of Philadelphia-style ice cream, which is made without eggs. In our September/ October 2001 vanilla ice cream tasting, Edy’s Dreamery came out on top. If you’re serving several guests, prescooping the ice cream makes serving quick and neat, but if you’re assembling only a couple servings or your freezer lacks space, you can skip the prescooping step. Refer to illustrations below when assembling profiteroles.

WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
To develop a perfect profiteroles recipe—for a crisp, tender, and airy pastry encasing cold, creamy ice cream and napped by dark, luxurious chocolate sauce—we began with the pastry, using both milk and water for puffs that were crisp and browned nicely. We used the powerful food processor to incorporate whole eggs into the choux paste and baked the puffs on an uncrowded baking sheet to keep them from collapsing. We slit the baked puffs to release steam and then returned them to the oven for 45 minutes to ensure crispness.

http://www.americastestkitchenfeed.com/bake-it-better/2013/01/secrets-to-profiteroles/

Serves 10 to 12

Be sure to give the pudding and the cake enough time to cool or you’ll end up with runny pudding and gummy cake.

WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
Chocolate Blackout Cake was first made by a bakery in Brooklyn 35 years ago. We wanted to create a version that could be prepared long after the shop had shut its doors. To achieve this, we used Dutch-processed cocoa for big chocolate flavor, and added cocoa powder to the butter we were already melting for the cake. This method—toasting the cocoa in the butter—produced a cake that was dark and rich. And to complement the distinctive chocolate flavor of the Chocolate Blackout Cake, we wanted the pudding component of our recipe to taste sweet and dairy-rich. We achieved this by using a combination of milk and half-and-half, which gave the pudding a velvety quality.

Makes one 9-inch cake
Ambrosia, food of the gods in Greek and Roman mythology, is something a bit more humble in most American households, where it’s better known as a chilled fruit salad, often made with mandarin oranges, pineapple, and coconut. The tall and tropical ambrosia cake, made with angel food cake, pineapple curd, and orange and vanilla frostings, has more heavenly aspirations.

WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
To prevent our Ambrosia Cake recipe’s pineapple curd from curdling, we combined the hot juice and egg-and-sugar slowly. We cut our angel food cake into four layers and sandwiched the curd and the orange and pineapple slices in between. We then used orange-flavored frosting to adhere the orange slices, and the pineapple curd to adhere the pineapple slices.

Serves 8

If you can’t find frozen pineapple, substitute fresh.

WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
For a sweeter, fresher flavor, we opted for frozen pineapple, which was more consistent than fresh fruit. We also drastically decreased the butter and used fat-free sour cream in place of the full-fat variety. To improve the color of the cake, we replaced some of the white sugar in the batter with brown. Because brown sugar is moister and more flavorful than white sugar, we could reduce the total sugar in the batter without worrying the cake would be dry or undersweetened. Merely topping pineapple with batter and baking the cake in the oven resulted in a soggy mess. To combat the problem, we sautéed the fruit with sugar on the stovetop to caramelize the pineapple and reduce some of the juices.

Traditional pineapple upside-down cake recipes have 430 calories, 18 grams of fat, and 13 grams of saturated fat per slice. Our changes brought the numbers down to 310 calories, 9 grams of fat, and 6 grams of saturated fat.

Serves 16

It’s worth using good-quality caramel sauce, such as Fat Toad Farm Goat’s Milk Caramel. If your blender doesn’t hold 2 quarts, process the flan in two batches. The cake needs to chill for at least 8 hours before you can unmold it.

WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
This hybrid dessert has a layer of chocolate cake and a layer of caramel-coated flan that “magically” switch places as they bake. For ease, we started with a simple dump-and-stir chocolate cake recipe. At first, the flan added too much moisture to the cake, making it soggy. A drier cake was key, and removing some of the buttermilk and sugar did the trick. To help our flan stand tall rather than slump when sliced, we use whole eggs (instead of just yolks) and add cream cheese as a stabilizer. We opted for store-bought caramel sauce to top it all off—much easier than homemade.

Makes 2 loaves
The test kitchen’s preferred loaf pan measures 8 1/2 by 4 1/2 inches; if using a 9 by 5-inch loaf pan, start checking for doneness five minutes early.

WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
Canned pumpkin puree often lends a raw, metallic flavor to pumpkin bread. We cook down the puree to eliminate those off-putting flavors. Instead of dirtying more dishes, we mix the quick bread right in the pot, adding cream cheese and buttermilk for their tangy flavor. A quick-to-assemble topping adds texture and keeps the loaf from getting soggy the next day.

MAKES 32 TO 40 PIECES

A straight-sided traditional (not nonstick) metal baking pan works best for making baklava; the straight sides ensure that the pieces will have nicely shaped edges, and the surface of a traditional pan will not be marred by the knife during cutting, as would a nonstick surface. If you don’t have this type of pan, a glass baking dish will work. Make sure that the phyllo is fully thawed before use; leave it in the refrigerator overnight or on the countertop for four to five hours. When assembling, use the nicest, most intact phyllo sheets for the bottom and top layers; use sheets with tears or ones that are smaller than the size of the pan in the middle layers, where their imperfections will go unnoticed. If, after assembly, you have remaining clarified butter, store it in an airtight container in the refrigerator; it can be used for sautéing.

WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
We wanted our baklava recipe to produce crisp, flaky, buttery lozenges, light yet rich, filled with fragrant nuts and spices, and sweetened just assertively enough to pair with a Turkish coffee. To achieve this goal, we sprinkled store-bought phyllo dough with three separate layers of nuts (a combination of almonds and walnuts) flavored with cinnamon and cloves. We clarified the butter for even browning. We found that cutting the baklava rather than just scoring it before baking helped it absorb the sugar syrup. Finally, allowing the baklava to sit overnight before serving improved itsthe flavor of our baklava recipe and was worth the wait.

http://www.americastestkitchenfeed.com/bake-it-better/2012/10/secrets-to-better-baklava/