By Dorie Greenspan
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Dorie Greenspan answered reader questions in a recent online chat. Unless otherwise noted, recipes with capitalized names can be found in the Recipe Finder at washingtonpost.com/recipes or elsewhere online.
Q: I would like to make pie entirely from scratch. I can do fillings, but crust recipes intimidate me. Can you please help with a basic recipe aimed at a person trying it for the first time?
A: I could never get the knack of cutting in butter (or shortening) with knives and only really got proficient – and at ease – with pie dough when I started making it in a food processor.
Try the pie crust in my Dorie Greenspan’s Blueberry Pie; it’s good with everything. Just remember that when it comes to doughs and crusts, cold is your friend.
Make the dough using very cold butter, and roll it out as soon as you make it. It’s really easy to roll when it’s freshly made. Even if your first attempt isn’t pastry-shop perfect, I’m betting you’ll think it’s 100 times better than store-bought.
Q: Can you suggest a couple of recipes that would be good for a bake sale and that could be made (or partially made) and frozen now? The bake sale is a month away.
A: Cookies, cookies and more cookies. They freeze beautifully.
While most cookies can be baked and then wrapped airtight and frozen for up to two months, many cookies can be partially made and baked closer to sale time.
Slice-and-bake cookies are the ideal prep-ahead, bake-later cookies.
My World Peace Cookies (you can find the recipe online) are slice-and-bake and would be great for the sale.
Bar cookies can be frozen after they’re baked, and they hold up really well. Also, most cookies that you scoop and then bake can be scooped, frozen and baked when you need them.
On the savory side, think corn bread, savory cheese breads and scones: They can be made ahead, frozen and baked straight from the freezer.
Q: Every time I try a recipe for pumpkin cookies, they come out caky and too soft for my taste. I assume it’s because the pumpkin adds extra moisture. Is there some way to include pumpkin flavors that can still create a more traditionally chewy cookie?
A: I’ve never had (or made) a pumpkin cookie that hasn’t been soft and caky; I think it would be hard for the cookies to be otherwise, given pumpkin’s moisture. You might try roasting pumpkin pieces until you’ve gotten out a lot of the moisture, then folding the pieces into a favorite cookie dough. I’ll bet pumpkin-studded chocolate chip cookies would be good.
Q: My favorite gluten-free dessert is flourless chocolate brownies, which I think are gooier and therefore better than flourless chocolate cake. It’s pumpkin pie season, so I’m thinking about cheesecake and similar desserts and wonder how I could add pumpkin and make them without the crust.
A: You might try my Dorie Greenspan’s Light and Creamy Cheesecake. It has a crumb crust, but you could use anything gluten-free to make the crumbs. And if you like, you could replace the cornstarch with potato starch. Because the recipe is so deliciously basic, you can easily play with it and pumpkinize it.
Q: What’s the secret to perfect cheesecake, and how do you keep the water bath from seeping into the cake? I see so much variation in recipes. Also, how long can you freeze them after they’re baked?
A: Cheesecakes come in so many varieties that it’s hard to say what the secret to a perfect one is, but usually one of the most important steps in cheesecake making is giving the batter a long beating. You want to make sure that the cream cheese is really, really smooth and that the eggs are well beaten. Take a look at the recipe for Light and Creamy Cheesecake that was just mentioned.
As for keeping the water from seeping into the cake: always an issue. The first step is to make sure that your springform pan closes tightly. Then wrap the pan in a double layer of aluminum foil, laying out the foil in a T shape that you can bring high up the sides of the pan.
Whenever I bake a cheesecake, I find that some water has seeped into the foil, but it has never spoiled the cake.