Editor Ruby is here to help you get ready for Trivia Mafia’s Baking theme night by sharing some of her best baking tips and tricks.

Happy November! As part of our autumnal celebrations, we’re running Baking trivia theme nights all month long. I’m here to tell you all my advice about baking! If you don’t consider yourself much of a baker, that’s OK. This is the best microwave mug cake. Have a great Friday. As for the rest of you: Enjoy this smattering of baking tips!

It’s pie season. I have never had great success with making pie crust by hand, but pie crust by food processor can get tough. My absolute favorite recipe for shortcrust pie dough is this one from Serious Eats, which accomplishes flakiness by making a solid paste of all the butter, sugar, salt, and ⅔ of the flour, and then folding in the rest of the flour. Instead of making layers with pockets of butter, it makes layers with flour, which doesn’t lead to the butter pouring out of your crust onto the floor of your oven, my traditional problem.
But what are you putting in your pies? When I make a pie with a firm fruit (rhubarb, apple, pear, and so forth), my default method is to pre-cook about two-thirds of the fruit into a compote with sugar on the stovetop, then add the rest in, in bite-sized pieces, just before baking. This is a good balance of cohesion and texture. For softer fillings (berries and peaches), there’s no reason to leave any of it out: par-cook all the fruit. I tend to default to tapioca starch and add it after par-cooking, because it’s the least chalky thickener, but be aware you’ll need about two times more of it than corn starch.
If you want to get a little fancier with it, you can make a caramel with the sugar and pre-cook the fruit in the caramel (like in this recipe). If you want to get really fancy with apples, and either have a mandoline or really good knife skills, this is actually my favorite apple pie recipe. (Scared of a mandoline? You’re right to be!! I only use mine with cut-proof gloves, an amazing invention.)
We’re moving away from this problem now, but who wants to turn their oven on in the summer, the time when all the fruit is best? A true dilemma that’s resolved by this stovetop fruit crisp. The streusel and filling are cooked separately, so you don’t have the problem of the top burning when the filling is raw.
I’ve never been one for making my own cream pies, but for a special treat for vegans, I had a great experience with this vegan, gluten-free cranberry cream pie. If you are making your own citrus pie, be careful to only use non-reactive tools for your citrus curd. I got a plastic-coated whisk specifically for making curds after I ruined one with a reactive whisk.
Speaking of dietary restrictions, the best gluten-free and dairy-free dessert I know about is this clementine cake. I like it so much I emailed all my GF friends a PDF of the recipe after I made it, unsolicited. It’s a Passover cake, so it’s pareve (no meat or milk), but it’s not good for vegans because you really need eggs. It’s most perfect for people like me, who get too enthusiastic about clementines and buy more than they can eat. The candied clementines are a huge pain to make and hard to cut through, so they’re for aesthetics only, but the chocolate glaze is in my opinion necessary.
Speaking of chocolate, I know two or three recipes from memory, and one of them is this brownie recipe. It’s all stuff I always have on hand, it’s always perfect, and it is possibly the most versatile baking recipe on earth. I’ve made it with anywhere from half a cup to a full cup of cocoa, with every gluten- free flour I’ve ever owned, with oil instead of butter, with flax instead of eggs, and it’s always something delicious. (To be perfectly honest, flax instead of eggs made something closer to a fudge than a brownie, but it was still great.)
I’m not a great bread maker, but I make this no-knead focaccia monthly. You don’t need to do the roasted garlic, but you do need to throw some kind of oil on it after it bakes, or it dries out very quickly. I’ve always struggled with a New York style pizza crust, and this solved all my problems. I make it in the stand mixer (10 minutes with the dough hook), not the food processor, because mine’s not high-powered enough and a lot of people in the comments said it burned out their motors. Mostly I just buy bread. Not my scene!

Here’s a few tips about equipment and ingredients:

You can’t overrate an accurate, fast food thermometer. It doubles as a cake tester; it’s helpful for savory cooking as well; it’s a great way to know if your bread is done. This is the only thermometer you need. I actually own two because I thought I lost mine and felt the need to instantly replace it.
I never buy yeast in packets, because it ends up being quite expensive. Most of the food co-ops around the Twin Cities sell active baker’s yeast (not brewer’s yeast or nutritional yeast, those are different) in their bulk sections. I spent $4 on yeast in 2017 and didn’t need to get more until 2021. Store it in the fridge, proof it before you use it, and you’re good to go.
If you don’t own a stand mixer and you feel like your buttercream never gets smooth and something’s wrong with you, it’s because it’s very hard to make good frosting without a stand mixer. It will still taste good, but it won’t look smooth. The butter for frosting should be colder than a hand-mixer can handle. That’s why! It’s not your fault.

Here are the things that have the best effort to impact ratio in my opinion:

Most chocolate cake is kind of a waste of your time. This is the best one. It makes a metric ton of cake (three very full 9” cake pans even though it says it makes two). It’s such a wet batter you’ll think you did it wrong, but you didn’t; it’s perfect.
This braided lemon cheesecake bread is something I’ve gotten more compliments on than almost anything else, and it’s very easy! I’ve made it within three hours with no rushing, which is shocking for a yeasted enriched dough. It gets stale quickly, but that’s unlikely to be a problem.
Speaking of lemon, lemon curd is much easier than I always assumed it was before I started making it. As long as everything you use for it is non-reactive, you’re good to go.
Smitten Kitchen’s strawberry summer cake is no joke when it comes to effort vs impact.

Here are things that are hard but worth it:

English toffee, or as my mom calls it, nut butter crunch. I was going to put this under the previous section, but then I remembered normal people consider making caramel automatically not easy.
You can make holographic chocolate using diffraction grating film, which requires tempering chocolate and buying the film, but it’s a real showstopper.
Melissa Clark’s chocolate babka recipe is two days of work, but it’s fantastic.

Here are things that are hard but not worth it:

Caramel popcorn! It feels like it should be so easy! But it’s a huge pain!
Making your own pumpkin pie filling from a pumpkin instead of a can. It tastes the same. It’s so much work!

I hope you enjoy baking, and Baking trivia!