13 Christmas Baking Tips From Celebrity Chefs

Holiday baking can be overwhelming. Even if you usually don't know your balloon whisk from your offset spatula, come the holiday season, you think it's a good idea to make gingerbread, mince pies, and other festive treats all from scratch. It can be tough to know which advice to follow and which to discard, which is why we've sought out Christmas baking tips from celebrity chefs. These folks know what they're doing and can help avert potential kitchen disasters.

Whatever your favorite celebrity chefs really serve for the holidays, they have some great advice when it comes to baking. Their tips and tricks can elevate otherwise lackluster festive bakes. Or they can help you see off potential problems before they happen. So, rather than spending Christmas Eve stressed out and covered in flour, you can learn those celeb chef secrets and make life easy for yourself. No more last minute terror about getting the holiday baking done, just tasty treats that come together easily.

If you remember Mary Berry from early seasons of "The Great British Baking Show," you'll know why you can trust her with this festive classic. Mince pies are a big thing in the U.K. so her tips for tastier ones are the real deal. She suggests putting orange zest in mince pie dough and we're here for it.

The first thing you should know about mince pies is that classic ones call for shortcrust pastry. This is different to American pie crust, with a crumbly texture almost like shortbread cookies. Normally the pastry for mince pies is plain, but Berry calls for orange zest in the dough, which elevates it, making these festive treats bright and flavorful.

Orange is a seasonal flavor around the holidays and you'll find it in most mincemeat — that's the somewhat unappetizing name for mince pie filling — in the form of mixed peel. Berry also suggests that you can make the orange flavor even stronger by adding half the orange zest to the dough and half to your mincemeat. Her recipe is made even more seasonal with the addition of grated marzipan.

We know what Ina Garten cooks for Christmas, but she also has some excellent festive baking tips. Holiday cookies are a staple for many. However, there are all kinds of ways they can go wrong. Even if you pull off the flavors, it's easy for them to end up looking less neat than you'd like. You might have been aiming for a professional finish but it looks like a 5-year-old made them.

The Barefoot Contessa gives us tips for better-looking classic holiday shortbread cookies, as well as linzer cookies. According to Garten, chilling the shaped cookies for 10 minutes before baking them gives them sharper edges for a more professional finish. But, if you want to get things done in advance, you can cut the shortbread into shapes and refrigerate them on a covered baking sheet for up to a week before baking them. The mixture is fine in the fridge and it means you can have freshly baked cookies in about 20 minutes. It's a great tip for beating that Christmas rush.

Christmas pudding — also known as figgy pudding or plum pudding — is a festive dessert originating from the U.K. It's a dense steamed sponge, filled with dried fruits, booze, and seasonal spices. The trouble is, figgy pudding takes a long time to make. However, British TV chef Nigella Lawson has a tip to speed up the cooking stage of Christmas pudding.

This dessert isn't a quick one, whatever you do. The first step is soaking all the dried fruits in booze, which you must do for at least 10 to 12 hours. However, you can steep the fruit for up to a week — and the longer you do, the better they're infused. Then, after mixing them together with all the other ingredients, you steam the pudding for five hours.

That might seem like an intense amount of time but you're not done yet. This is just the first cooking stage, after which you wrap the pudding in foil and set it aside until Christmas Day. You can make it up to six weeks in advance and many people think the longer, the better. On the big day, you steam it for yet another three hours. If this seems excessive, Lawson has a time for you. Using a pressure cooker can decrease the first steaming down to two hours and 20 minutes (steam it on the stovetop for the first 20 minutes) and the second steaming to just 40 minutes.

The holidays are expensive enough as it is without the added cost of buying a million different spices to put in your Christmas cookies. Luckily, you can take Sunny Anderson's lead and use something you might already have in your pantry from your fall baking stint: pumpkin spice. If you think this doesn't sound right, you might need to learn more about the types of spices used in sweet treats.

Festive spices are the kinds of sweet spices you'll often find in baked goods, but they come into their own around the holidays. Many Christmas baked goods contain a selection of these spices, including ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and cloves. Pumpkin spice is the combination of spices traditionally used to flavor pumpkin pie — and now a load of other goods from lattes to candles. Recipes vary, but it usually consists of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves. That basically covers all the basics.

Anderson has a chocolate chip candy cane cookie recipe in which she uses pumpkin spice instead of individual spices. While the ratios might not be exactly the same, you can use it to replace individual spices in basically any festive recipe. For instance, if a recipe calls for 1 teaspoon each of cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg, you could use 3 teaspoons of pumpkin spice instead. The results won't be identical but they'll be close enough.

Stollen is a festive fave but some people don't find it sweet enough. Martha Stewart has a great tip, though. She braids her dough which means icing pools in those crevices giving you bursts of sugary goodness.

If you're wondering what stollen actually is, we'll start there. It's a festive bake that's traditional in Germany and may date back as far as the 1300s, so it has a long culinary history. It's a lightly sweet, dense bread that's filled with dried fruits like raisins and dried apricots, as well as almonds and festive spices. Some versions contain marzipan, but it's not a given.

Usually, stollen is shaped like a small free-form loaf but Stewart's version, which comes from her mother, is braided. To form this bread, once you've made the dough and left it to rise, you divide it into three pieces per loaf and plait them together in a standard three-strand braid. You then proof the braided loaves again before baking. Not only does the braided shape catch the icing, as we already mentioned, but it looks neater and more festive.

With their crackled surfaces that appear dusted with snow, crinkle cookies are always a hit in the holiday season. But it's disappointing when you bake a batch and they turn out dry and underwhelming. Carla Hall has a secret to avoid this: she slightly underbakes them.

In her recipe for chocolate cherry crinkle cookies, Hall bakes them for just six minutes. She explains that they should still be soft in the middle when you take them out of the oven. You cool them on the baking tray, so the residual heat helps to finish them off just right. There's no chance of overbaking them and winding up with a dry crumb.

Hall's recipe is for chocolate-cherry cookies, but you could use the same technique for any crinkle cookie you like. One of the things she loves about crinkle cookies is how versatile they are, mentioning some of her favorite options are lemon, ginger, and red velvet. Hall believes the cherry gives them a holiday twist but you could also add festive spices, orange, peppermint, or any other flavor with a festive bent.

Gingerbread comes in many forms: gingerbread cookies, gingerbread houses, and more cake-like gingerbreads. But, maybe you haven't thought about making a gingerbread cake. Gordon Ramsay recommends baking a gingerbread Bundt cake this season, big enough to feed a crowd.

The holidays can involve cooking for larger groups than you usually cater for, which can be stressful. But Ramsay has a top tip for cooking for a crowd: make something big. This is why making a gingerbread Bundt cake is a great idea. It's less fussy and time consuming than rolling and shaping a large batch of individual gingerbread cookies but you can still enjoy the same flavor profile. It's pretty much a Christmas miracle.

There are many Bundt cake recipes, so what sets this one apart? The sponge has a classic gingerbread taste. Ginger is at the forefront, naturally, but it also contains cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and allspice for more Christmassy goodness. It also contains molasses and brown sugar, giving it that deep, rich flavor you'd expect from gingerbread. The spiced glaze contains cinnamon and cloves, plus a little rum for a festive kick. It's all baked in a 12-cup Bundt pan, so it's big enough to feed a crowd.

Giada De Laurentiis has some excellent advice for the holidays: you don't have to make everything from scratch. Her almond orange pandoro Christmas cake recipe uses a ready-made Italian Christmas treat as its base, saving you the work of baking from scratch.

De Laurentiis' upgraded holiday cake turned heads on Instagram, but before you can understand what's going on with it, you need to know what pandoro is. You've probably heard of panettone but pandoro is its rival for the hearts and stomachs of Italians everywhere. It's made from a similar enriched yeasted dough, not unlike brioche. But, while panettone is filled with dried fruit and peel, pandoro is usually plain. Pandoro also has a different shape, like an eight-pointed star.

Using this Italian Christmas classic, De Laurentiis has created an even more impressive festive dessert. She cut it into five pieces horizontally, using each as a layer for this dessert. In between each layer, she spread a homemade mascarpone cream, made with heavy cream, mascarpone, powdered sugar, orange zest, and almond extract. The layers are arranged offset to make a festive Christmas tree shape. Finished with an orange syrup and your decorations of choice, this is an easy way to make a showstopper dessert.

Speaking of showstoppers, Paul Hollywood from "The Great British Baking Show" is no stranger to festive baking. His white Christmas cake recipe stands out from others by using a wider variety of fruit compared to the classic version. This makes it a more interesting choice, especially if you aren't a fan of traditional fruitcake.

Regular Christmas cakes rely on basic dried fruits, such as currants and raisins. They're also made with brown sugar and occasionally treacle. And to top it off, they're soaked in rum and brandy for weeks to age them and keep them moist. This makes your average fruit cake heavy and intense.

Hollywood, on the other hand, gives us the option to make a lighter Christmas cake. The biggest difference, perhaps, is that it uses a wider range of dried fruits. It doesn't use the more intensely concentrated options, like raisins and prunes. Instead, it includes candied pineapple and mixed peel for a brighter, less potent flavor. It also uses white sugar to further lighten the recipe. And there's no need to soak it in booze. You can eat it right away. It's the perfect way to make Christmas cake for people who don't really like Christmas cake.

Apple pie is as American as, well, apple pie. But it isn't an obvious choice of festive dessert. That said, you can follow the lead of celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck and give it a Christmassy twist. With a few tweaks here and there, you can make it the star of the holiday dessert table.

Puck's Christmas apple pie recipe features dried fruits and festive spices alongside the usual suspects. And, while cinnamon might be a fairly common addition to regular apple pie, by the time you add nutmeg, citrus zest, and all that dried fruit, this pie certainly feels festive. It's reminiscent of a cross between an apple pie and a giant mince pie.

It's a great option for anyone who doesn't want to stray too far from their usual favorites while still getting a little outside their comfort zone. You could also make other festive additions if you think this isn't enough. Almonds, marzipan, candied peel, and angelica could all make an appearance without overdoing things.

A Yule log is an iconic festive dessert but it's daunting to pull off, especially if you aren't a hugely confident baker. It has a lot of steps and components that can end in disaster. There are many mistakes people make with Yule logs and some of them lead to cracking, instead of that picture-perfect swirl of sponge and icing. But a tip from Prue Leith could help you avoid the crack.

Normally, you'd expect to wait until your cake was fully cool before handling it. Leith isn't the only one who's seen what happens when "Great British Baking Show" contestants try to frost hot sponges. But her chocolate Yule log recipe tells us to get our hands on that sponge as soon as possible after baking.

Now, the idea isn't to roll it up with the icing inside, but rather to roll it up, let it cool, then unroll it, fill it, and roll it again. Sounds like a pain? Well, it's definitely a fussy recipe but this will help you pull it off. The reason you should roll it while it's still warm is so the starches and proteins in the cake set in their rolled shape. This makes the sponge less likely to crack when you ultimately roll it into shape. Use baking parchment to help you roll it and keep the baking parchment inside the roll while it cools so the cake doesn't stick to itself.

Alfajores are tender, buttery cookies made with cornstarch for their signature delicate crumb. They're filled with dulce de leche and often dusted with powdered sugar or coated in chocolate. Popular across Argentina, Peru, and beyond, alfajores aren't usually Christmas cookies but you can decorate them like drums for a festive twist, the way Lorena Garcia did on "Good Morning America." Or, you could try out other festive decorations, like reindeer or snowflake designs.

The trouble with making alfajores is that the dough can be tricky to roll. However, Garcia has a simple solution. You roll it out between two pieces of parchment paper. This keeps the rolling pin from sticking to the dough and helps stop it tearing as you roll it out to a quarter-inch thick. You then put the dough in the freezer, while still in between sheets of parchment, until it's firm, which should take around 15 minutes. At this point, you can peel away the parchment without losing any of the dough. It also makes the dough easier to cleanly cut with cookie cutters.

There are certain flavor combinations that are popular around Christmas: festive spices like ginger and cinnamon, chocolate and peppermint, citrus and spice, dried fruit and molasses. But what if you're looking for something different? Former "Great British Baking Show" winner and current TV chef Nadiya Hussain suggests combining chocolate and chestnuts in holiday bakes. It's familiarly festive but elevated.

Hussain has a chestnut torta recipe that combines these flavors. It blends chocolate and chestnuts alongside roasted hazelnuts for even more Christmassy goodness. It also uses ground almonds in place of some of the wheat flour, giving you a dense, moist cake that's packed full of flavor. It's unassuming, but this torta makes an excellent Christmas dessert, served with some vanilla ice cream or brandy butter. The chestnut flavor comes through surprisingly well, despite everything else going on with this bake. Plus, it contains a little instant coffee to help accentuate those chocolatey flavors.