Holiday Baking Tips From a World-Class Pastry Chef

One of the big differences between savory cooking and baking is that you really do need to follow the recipe. Carefully. Very carefully.

“I find the precision and the science behind pastry making is the absolute best,” Chef Mick says. “When you’re cooking with just intuition, things can free-fall, and go askew and become muddled.”

So successful baking starts with a great recipe . . . and an attainable goal.

“Start off with something basic and approachable. Cookies. A cake, something that can get done in a couple of hours, and if it doesn’t come out so well, that won’t leave you disappointed. Don’t do something that takes two days. And cook something that you want to eat,” she laughs.

But even basic recipes aren’t created equal. “Find sources that you respect, and then read (the recipe) all the way through carefully to make sure it makes sense to you, and to make sure you have everything you need before you start,” she says.

Do you have all the equipment? Does the recipe require techniques you haven’t tried or haven’t mastered? How long does it take (do you need, for example, to refrigerate the dough for hours or overnight?) And make sure you understand every step.

If it’s an online recipe, read the comments. Readers who’ve tried the recipe will a) give feedback about the recipe, including errors and omissions, as well as the end result, and b) report on the tweaks they tried and whether or not those tweaks worked. 

Mick reminds us that something that seems conceptually simple can actually require a lot of technique and a lot of choices. If you’re making your first pie, or your first pie in a while, you might assume that an apple pie is an easy default.

But in reality, apple pie offers up a lot of variables. Which apples do you choose? How do you slice them? How do you arrange them? How do you keep the bottom crust from getting soggy? What kind of top do you choose?

On the other hand, a custard pie might sound daunting, but it’s actually more straightforward to execute. If it’s your first try at a pie and you’re serving it to your company, she suggests buying a frozen piecrust. Then you can add the custard from a basic recipe. Fancy it up with a top layer of whipped cream or ganache. And you can add off-the-beaten-path flavors to your basic custard base: Try a strong brew of your favorite tea, or rich spices like cardamom.

Your prep starts with basics like clearing enough counter space to roll out dough and making sure your oven is clean and ready to bake. Grab whisks, scrapers, bowls in the right sizes (bigger is usually better), plus pans and sheet pans, as well as your hand or stand mixer if you’re using one. (Chef Mick recalls that she got her first Kitchen Aid stand mixer at age 12 and was making soufflés when she was a tween.)

Next, turn to the oven. Chef Mick ensures the rack is in the middle, and if the oven has a convection setting, she activates it for more even heat. Keep in mind that some recipes include directions for convection baking, which often involves reducing the temperature and, in some cases, reducing the baking time. Your oven may even have a convection conversion setting that makes the adjustment for you. Once your concoction is in the oven, resist the urge to open the door. According to our testers, cracking the door open while baking, even for just a few seconds, can let out as much as 75 degrees of heat.

Baking is an exacting discipline. Skim milk or oat milk isn’t a direct substitute for whole milk. Baking powder and baking soda may seem like they do roughly the same thing, but they’re not interchangeable. And if a recipe calls for three large eggs, it’ll come out a little different if you use three medium or extra-large eggs. In the spirit of accuracy, Chef Mick doesn’t measure her ingredients and instead weighs them with a small kitchen scale for better precision.

“Pam is your friend,” Chef Mick says. She keeps two cans by her stove (just in case she runs out). “Its flavor is neutral, and it simply works well.” For some recipes, she might try buttering a baking pan and then sprinkling it lightly with sugar. “If you do butter and sugar on a cake pan, that does create a caramelized crust around the edges of your pan, which is a nice addition.” While reusable Silpat silicone baking sheets are cool and sustainable, you can still get great results with parchment paper you can buy in the grocery store.

And don’t cheap out on baking sheets. Better-quality baking sheets, such as the model from Nordic Ware that sits near the top of CR’s ratings, retain heat better, are less likely to twist when you turn up the temperature, and are also easier to clean.

Who says dessert has to be sweet? To respect her mom’s palate, which is sensitive to overly cloying desserts, Chef Mick ensures that her pastries are balanced with salt, pepper (yes, pepper), some heat, and a touch of acid, while keeping the sweetness in check. “I want to make sure it’s not just sugar on sugar,” she says.

If you’re intimidated, you can start with minor experimentation. If a recipe calls for a teaspoon of vanilla extract, you can, say, substitute a little bourbon and maple syrup and maybe even a little soy for a deeper flavor profile. Or try rum, coconut milk, fresh mint, and lime zest to move the flavors in a Caribbean direction. To see if the flavors work, try just mixing a tiny amount—literally a teaspoon of batter, dough, or custard base and add a drop or two of flavoring.

But it’s just a dessert, so why not go big? If you’re baking a chocolate cake, for example, try adding a little harissa, a North African chili paste with comforting warm spices. 

If you’re making a custard or ice cream for the holiday, try infusing the milk with Caribbean jerk spices. Almost on a whim, Chef Mick added her father’s leftover jerk spices to the ice cream base at the Musket Room, though it would work just as well with a custard pie. Jerk seasoning is a rich and flavorful blend containing scotch bonnet peppers, allspice, scallion, garlic, onion, ginger, rice wine vinegar, and honey, although Mick now usually uses jerk seasoning made by Brittney “Chef Stikxz” Williams, her L’Atelier Ébène partner.

Chef Mick likes to roll out her cookies, then put them on sheet pans and stash them in the fridge before baking. Ideally, she likes to let them chill for a full day, which gives the flour a chance to hydrate and allows the dough to rest. But if that’s not an option, 8 hours is enough. 

She recently created a video for Eater where she had to make holiday cookies using a surprise box of ingredients, including cotton candy grapes and rice flour. She used many of the techniques she mentions here, and watching her at work is an education. She started by adding some lemon zest to the warm spices in the dough, some aromatic Szechuan peppercorns to the caramel, and some zesty but savory goat cheese on top. 

She adds that holiday cookies need to be pretty, so she scooped out the dough with a small ice cream scoop, and instead of adding an actual “thumbprint” for the caramel, she used a smaller scoop instead. And when they’re done but still warm, she “shingled” them a bit with a ring mold so they’d be perfectly round.