Gabrielle Feuersinger has made lavish cakes for celebrities, including a four-tier saffron gateau for Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore's wedding and a cake for Post Malone that resembled his Texas hometown stadium.
The intention and love behind homemade treats often make them preferable to their store-bought counterparts. Yet, if you don't have all the time and ingredients to make every component from scratch, taking a few shortcuts is acceptable.
Potassium bromate is a dough conditioner that bakers have long used to strengthen dough, improve elasticity and create a more consistent final product, especially helpful in New York's unpredictable weather.
Baking powder is a must-have for any home baker. When it interacts with water, it releases carbon dioxide bubbles, giving the perfect lift and airiness that you need for a delicate cake, cookie, or dessert.
Raw cookie dough is disgusting. Cookie dough tastes better cooked. Why would you leave it in its untransformed, its nascent state, when 10 minutes in the oven turns it into something that is the food of the gods?
Using a warped one is among the worst mistakes you can use with a sheet pan: If the nice, flat pan becomes raised in some places, that's exactly where food will cook or bake unevenly.
"We're bringing our childhood memories to the table, and now people are paying attention," said Erick Rocha, pastry chef at Corima in Manhattan and the all-day cafe Vato, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where conchas regularly sell out.
Chrissy Teigen's banana bread is incredibly sweet, with dark chocolate chunks that don't quite balance the sweetness, resulting in a cake-like, chewy texture rather than the tender crumb typical of banana bread.
The cake came to me rather easily. I had a vision. I got lucky. But the challenge came when it was time to develop the frosting. I feel like everyone in the Test Kitchen had an opinion on what it should be...I definitely tried at least 10 different frostings.
Trader Joe's cinnamon raisin bread was soft, very sweet, and decadently moist. Each slice contained just the right amount of luscious, rich cinnamon sugar swirls and pops of juicy raisins.
The Cheesecake-Off 2026 will feature some of London's best restaurant and bakery teams, including Big Mamma Group and Cakes & Bubbles by Albert Adrià, competing for the ultimate cheesecake title.
Baking time and temperature are dependent on the type of cake you're making. A dense, heavier, and moister fruitcake is going to need to be baked longer and at a higher temperature than angel food cake, which you don't want to brown.
I was just sort of desperate. Anything that I could possibly make, I wanted to make, and I turned to the kitchen. I tried to make this almond cake, and it doesn't go exactly as planned. It goes awry. And I think that's kind of rare in cookbooks to see, you know, the first instance of baking turn out to be, you know, this sort of humiliation, this massive failure.
I was worried about losing my carefully crafted identity as a professional. I was looking for something to carry me through that time What else can I be? She decided to do rather than be something new. Hardin Woods would bake a pie every day for a year, using fresh ingredients local to her home in Salem, Oregon and she would give each pie away.
