The 13 best baking classes in NYC

If you love croissants but want to step up your game beyond tubed dough, enroll in Atelier Sucré’s Bake Your Own French Croissant course and learn how to make perfect at-home versions of this delicate and flaky pastry. In this course, students will learn the skills required to make a traditional croissant, a sweet pains au chocolat and a savory ham and cheese croissant. Once you’re done with this course, any meal can be made all the more elegant and fancy with the addition of any variation on the French classic.

The dense crumb and smooth frosting on Butter Lane’s cupcakes have kept customers coming back to the East Village storefront for years. Fans will want to sign up for a two-hour group class in the bakery’s industrial kitchen to learn to make three cakes and icings for themselves. You’ll take home a half-dozen moist, buttery cupcakes, plus Butter Lane’s signature recipe so you can recreate them whenever a craving strikes.

It is no secret that New Yorkers are rather proud of their bagel culture (which is superior, despite what San Francisco residents may try to tell themselves). If you want to learn how to make authentic New York bagels, you can enroll in the Perfect Bagel Baking Workshop offered by BagelUp, one of the city’s finest artisan bagel shops. In this course, students will learn how to prep dough, shape bagels and properly boil and top the bagels. Whether you prefer a schmear of cream cheese, a bit of fresh lox or a bagel with everything, this course will be perfect for you.

Sticking with the pizza (because one pizza option is never enough), Abigail’s Kitchen offers a technique class that teaches home cooks how to make restaurant-quality pizza without investing in a dedicated pizza oven. In this course, a professional chef will guide students through making the dough for a pizza, properly topping their creation and cooking it to perfection. Students will learn simple tricks to ensure they use the best ingredients and ways to quickly (and cheaply) spice up any pizza, making their home pizza nights all the more exciting.

Pizza is arguably one of the most universally loved foods on the planet, and setting aside your preference for New York, Chicago or Detroit-style pizza, few things bring people together like a well-baked pizza. This pizza-making class doubles as an excellent social activity for events like birthday parties, showers or corporate team-building events as participants are guided through hand-making their own classic Neapolitan-style pizza. Bakers will learn about the history of pizza and the development of different styles and trends in the pizza world (like why pineapple pizza became so popular in Canada), all while learning how to make pizza in their own homes. Plus, at the end of the event, it stops being a class and becomes a pizza party, which is how almost every event should end.

If the internet has demonstrated anything over the years, it is that people love the idea of elaborately decorated cakes. If you want to become a part of this trend and gain your own online following (or you just want to make desserts that look nice), you can enroll in a dedicated cake decorating class at the NY Cake Academy. You’ll learn crumb-coating, piping techniques and how to work with buttercream, as well as decorating techniques themed to the specific course (perhaps how to make a cake look like a Thanksgiving turkey or how to make cookies for Christmas). Learning how to decorate desserts is an easy and fun way to create impressive baked goods for your next event and it is a unique chance to be creative with your food.

Cake or yeasted? That’s the big debate in the doughnut world. Luckily, you’ll make both crumbly, dense cake doughnuts and light, fluffy yeasted doughnuts in this hands-on workshop at the Brooklyn Kitchen. Once you’ve sampled the handmade variety, you can decide once and for all which kind you prefer. The Brooklyn Kitchen doubles as a cooking supply store, so it’s also an ideal place to pick up any pans or utensils you might be missing.

Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/World’s Direction

One of the most enjoyable parts of baking fresh desserts is that decorating them and turning them into miniature works of edible art is half the fun (the other half is eating them, obviously). In this Sugar Room cookie workshop, participants will spend four hours learning how to create handcrafted works of cookie art using royal icing techniques and tools. Using a special cookie dough and a handful of different consistencies of royal icing, students will learn techniques for outlining, floating icing and illustrating that will make their next plate of holiday cookies the talk of the evening.

Combine comfort food with comfort television in this Home Cooking NYC class that will see participants recreating some of the classic dishes from the hit British baking program. In this class, students will learn how to make dishes like a Victoria sandwich cake and a classic Swiss roll that would impress even Paul and Prue. Plus, once the course is over, not only will everyone have fresh baked desserts to bring home with them, but they will also leave with an additional recipe for a  lemon poppyseed drizzle cake to test their baking prowess in their home kitchens.

Baking is often considered one of the easiest kinds of cooking to mess up, and, as a result, a lot of people think that they will never learn how to bake. At Home Cooking New York, the Baking Bootcamp for Amateurs is a great place to start learning how to bake in a comfortable setting. Over four weeks, students will learn how to make cookies, cakes, pies and tarts, as well as savory baked goods. If you are looking to learn how to make scrumptious at-home desserts, this is one of the best places to start.

While baking is often done in solitude (since the social aspect takes place once you are done with the baking and begin eating), it can also be a good activity for groups of people looking to have a fun evening while learning a practical skill (and eating a scrumptious dessert or a fine loaf of bread). Whether you are looking for an ideal corporate team-building event, a weekend activity with friends or a unique option for a birthday party, shower or other celebration, baking classes are worth considering. 

Spend an evening learning to make top-quality pizza from the comfort of your home with this virtual pizza-making workshop. Perfect for an after-work event, this online seminar will see participants working with a professional chef to prepare the dough, sauce and toppings for a Neapolitan-style pizza they will bake in their ovens. Taught in a virtual classroom, this course still offers plenty of time for attendees to talk, socialize and enjoy themselves as a group while they each make their own delicious pizza for dinner. Don’t worry about ensuring you have the ingredients on hand since every participant will be shipped a box of supplies (including flour for a dough that can be made gluten-free) to ensure they are all on the same page when the baking starts.

If bagels and pizza feel too savory, consider a dessert baking class, like the Virtual Cinnamon Roll Workshop. In this guided baking workshop, participants will learn how to create this decadent breakfast dish by hand. With the help of a professional chef, participants will turn the package of ingredients shipped to their homes into fluffy, melty cinnamon rolls that they can enjoy with family and friends (or save to give themselves a treat each morning as they prepare for work) and leave them with a recipe that they can create over and over again.

Some of your teammates, co-workers, friends or family might not be lucky enough to live in NYC and enjoy the majesty of an authentic New York bagel. In this course, you can provide them with the next best thing, a step-by-step guide (led by a professional chef) on how to make a perfect New York-style bagel. Participants in this class will work with an experienced baker to mix and roll their own bagel dough, boil and bake their bagels and top them with whatever strikes their fancy. All of the required ingredients (except for the water that New Yorkers claim is vital) will be shipped directly to participants' homes, meaning that everyone will have everything they need to start creating these iconic NY delicacies.