There’s a glorious optimism in the moment that one decides to bake. Maybe you’re craving cookies, have been assigned something sweet for a potluck, or have just won yourself a free hour and have sufficient flour in the pantry. But that optimism that can quickly dissolve into paralysis when it comes time to choose a recipe.
If baking is a pastime you rarely have time to indulge in, the pressure to pick the single most mind-blowing banana bread, soft-centered chocolate brownies, or juicy and crusty cobbler can be particularly intense. When baking for a crowd, it’s even worse. Wasn’t this supposed to be fun?
In these moments of analysis paralysis, Kristen Miglore, the author of Food52’s longstanding Genius Recipes column, beams into my kitchen like a superhero. I have long depended on her for my go-to roasted chicken, Caesar salad dressing, and World Peace cookies, all of which appeared in her first Genius Recipes cookbook.
With her second book, Genius Desserts, Miglore heroically dove back into the untamed morass of recipes on the internet (and beyond) to emerge, triumphant, with a volume of cookies, cakes, brownies, bars, pies, tarts, and more that meet the very high bar of “genius” recipes.
“There’s usually something memorable and surprising about them,” says Miglore. “And then once you make them, you kind of can’t forget them. In the best cases, they change the way you cook.”
Some of these are seminal, and some are internet-famous. Some reinvent a flavor profile (the salted chocolate caramel tart that taught us to salt desserts); others break a rule in a well-established process (beating butter with flour in addition to sugar to begin a cake); and some call for counterintuitive or wacky ingredients that result in easier execution or a more exquisite finished result (sweet potatoes in chocolate frosting!).
These are not her own recipes, Miglore is quick to point out. They’re culled from other cookbook authors, chefs, bloggers, editors, and home cooks. But her curation and “genius” seal carry great weight to her legion of fans. After seven years of writing her column, Miglore has her process of investigating and testing recipes down to a science.
The world of desserts, where the power of personal nostalgia and scientific precision collide, is fertile ground for Miglore’s approach. For the book, that meant canvassing her own network of chefs, cookbook authors, and food writers, as well as thousands of home cooks in Food52’s online community, for their best and favorite recipes—all with a plot twist or tweak that elevates them to “genius” level.
The pantheon of well-known genius bakers (See: Dorie Greenspan, Maida Heatter, Rose Levy Beranbaum) are represented, but Miglore also unearthed unlikelier gems with the help of her readers. “I was pretty blown away by their response,” she said. One of her favorite finds—a no-churn lemon ice cream that requires just a single stirring due to its magical proportions of lemon and dairy—came from a tip left by a reader in her comments. “I never in a million years would have found it on my own.”
All of which is to say, the book rescues you from the internet and delivers you the best of the best, so you can just bake already. We could waste decades arguing over the quintessential chocolate brownie, but if you choose the one from Genius Desserts, you’re sure to end up with outstanding results.
And because Miglore’s process involves falling deep into the rabbit-hole of what makes a recipe “genius,” you’re also likely to learn something, from the highly readable headnotes which top each recipe. In the case of those brownies, it’s that replacing melted chocolate with powdered cocoa allowed chocolate savant Alice Medrich to precisely control the chocolate-level of her brownies and deliver perfectly gooey centers.
“By taking out the chocolate, with its variable fat and sugar, Medrich was able to control and fine-tune the proportions of both,” writes Miglore. “When she added the fat back (in the form of butter), the centers stayed softer.”
Genius!