Baking

This is a quick throw-together that should always be in your brunch recipe arsenal. The muffins look and taste great—and you won’t have to spend $2.50 in a coffee shop.

If you’re ever in Sydney, Australia, there is a breakfast place in Darlinghurst called bills. The name is simple, and the place serves simply some of the best food I’ve ever had. When you order coffee, the waiter brings out small plates of warm toasted coconut bread freshly dusted with powered sugar. After one bite, my girlfriend and I decided to go back for breakfast every morning for the rest of our trip. This bread really holds up if you wrap it in plastic or put it in a storage container. You’ll still be snacking on it days later.

Pot pie has come long way. I recently went to a charity event in New York City, at which David Bowie was the guest of honor. The main course? Chicken pot pie. Go figure! Frozen puff pastry sheets work really well here without compromising the dish, but allow an hour or more to thaw the frozen sheets. Serving individual pot pies makes for a great presentation. You can pick the crocks up at any kitchen store or use 2-cup ramekins if you already have them.

Sometimes it’s a case of “the simpler the better.” Here, you bake apples in a rich, buttery caramel sauce and it doesn’t take much time to get it all together, either.

Perfect for autumn holiday meals, this pie is best served warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Pumpkin pie is a custard-type pie that bakes most easily in the convection oven at a steady temperature. Because ovens can vary, if your pie gets too dark too soon, reduce the oven temperature by another 25 degrees. The pie is done when a knife inserted just off center comes out clean and the center of the pie still jiggles but is not liquid. This will be in 10 to 15 minutes less time than if baked in a conventional oven. I prefer pumpkin pie chilled rather than hot from the oven, which allows me to bake it a day in advance.

This classic dessert is a “soft-hard” meringue that needs to dry in the oven rather than actually bake. If it is at all browned, the result is a chewy, not delicate base for fresh strawberries or other soft fruits and berries. The convection oven produces an ideally tender meringue that can be made ahead and stored in an airtight container in a cool place for at least 2 weeks.

These brownies turn out moist and fudgy. They bake in the convection oven at 25 degrees lower and for 10 minutes less baking time.

An apple pie “made from scratch” has no competition from store-bought pies. Here’s the basic recipe with some favorite variations. To bake a frozen apple pie, see the chart. Convection-baked pies cook in about one-third less time.

You can use these directions to adapt your favorite biscotti recipe to bake in the convection oven. Both temperature and baking time are reduced, plus you can bake on multiple racks with even results.

These cookies are a little less sweet than most. Preheat the convection oven while you quickly mix up the dough. Space the oven racks evenly in the oven and bake three panfuls at one time.

In the convection oven, the baking temperature is reduced from 375°F to 350°F, and the baking time from 12 to 9 minutes. If that alone isn’t enough to convince you to turn on the convection bake mode, I bake three sheets of cookies at one time, which is what the recipe yields, reducing the total baking time from 36 to 9 minutes.

Using a convection oven lets you bake multiple sheets of cookies at one time. Just be sure to use dark, rimless, noninsulated cookie sheets.

Chewy with nuts, coconut, dried fruit, and chocolate chips. Using my quick one-bowl method, you can stir up the cookie dough in the same time it takes for the oven to preheat.

These are shaped rather than rolled cookies. To shape even-sized cookies it is helpful to use a #40 ice cream scoop that measures exactly 1 tablespoon of dough. Arrange the oven racks so they are evenly spaced. This works best for most cookies and multiple pans will bake evenly at the same time.

Buttery and delicious, this dough can be flavored and shaped many different ways. In the convection oven I bake three pans at a time. For the best flavor, wrap and refrigerate the dough for at least 24 hours. During this time the butter and additional flavors (see variations) develop.

These are my favorite “mass-production” cookies. So, when I have little time to bake, these are the cookies I choose.

Brown sugar in these cut-out cookies gives them a rich, caramel-butterscotch flavor. Use any cookie cutters, or follow the directions for Praline-Filled Chocolate Drizzle Cookies (page 217) for delicious cookies shaped, filled, and frosted in mass-production style.

This is the simplest of doughs for cut-out cookies, but the best! Bake three sheets of cookies at a time and reduce the oven temperature to 300°F for the most even baking.

This is a basic recipe for a simple-to-make jelly roll. Instead of spreading the cake with jelly, you can spread it with whipped cream and sprinkle with fresh berries before you roll up the cake. Another option is to substitute a rich chocolate ganache and roll up the cake before the ganache sets.