Serves 16

It’s worth using good-quality caramel sauce, such as Fat Toad Farm Goat’s Milk Caramel. If your blender doesn’t hold 2 quarts, process the flan in two batches. The cake needs to chill for at least 8 hours before you can unmold it.

WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
This hybrid dessert has a layer of chocolate cake and a layer of caramel-coated flan that “magically” switch places as they bake. For ease, we started with a simple dump-and-stir chocolate cake recipe. At first, the flan added too much moisture to the cake, making it soggy. A drier cake was key, and removing some of the buttermilk and sugar did the trick. To help our flan stand tall rather than slump when sliced, we use whole eggs (instead of just yolks) and add cream cheese as a stabilizer. We opted for store-bought caramel sauce to top it all off—much easier than homemade.

Serves 18 to 20

We prefer an 18 by 13-inch nonstick baking sheet for this pie. If using a conventional baking sheet, coat it lightly with cooking spray. You will need 4 ounces of animal crackers.

WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS:
Unlike a traditional apple pie, a slab pie is prepared in a baking sheet and can feed up to 20 people. Its filling is thickened to ensure neat slicing, and it’s topped with a sugary glaze. But rolling out the dough to cover both the bottom and top of this mammoth pie proved problematic, as was making the filling thick enough to hold up to slicing. To avoid these challenges, we used store-bought crusts for our Apple Slab Pie recipe, which proved sturdier than homemade. Gluing two crusts together with water and then rolling the dough into a large rectangle allowed us to get the crust into the large pan without a tear. To improve the bland flavor of the pie crust, we rolled it in crushed animal crackers, which contributed a sweet and buttery flavor to the crust of our Apple Slab Pie. Flour helped thicken our apple filling, but the result was too pasty. Cornstarch made the filling slimy, but tapioca thickened it well without making it starchy.

http://www.americastestkitchenfeed.com/bake-it-better/2013/01/secrets-to-apple-slab-pie/