Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Sweet potato protein shake!

A nice cocoa meringue!

I think the best tip I ever picked up for apple pie was from the Joy of Baking website, where she suggests tossing the apples with your sugars first and letting them macerate and release all their juices BEFORE putting them in the pie. Once your apples are nice and soupy, drain off the sugar juice and reduce it down into a fantastic apple caramel glaze to add back to the apples. Every pie I've made since then has taken that advice, and it makes it so my filling reduces far less in the oven.

However, I will admit that right now there's a batch of apple turnovers sitting on my counter made with cresent roll dough from a can. We had every intention of using puff pastry, but didn't have the two hours for it to defrost, so we instead made strudel with a roll-out crust and turnovers with crescent dough. (I'm in graduate school, am I still allowed to play the "lazy-student" card?)

May I suggest minced candied ginger in an apple filling? For the minced apple filling in the turnovers it added a wonderful flavor note and texture to the creamy Braeburn apples.

While the knee-jerk reaction is absolutely Morimoto, I would have to reconsider and give Batali his cred. Flay's pompous, and Cora has some mad skills, but Batali always always impresses me (sometimes more than Morimoto). So the orange clogs win it for me, too.