Whenever I make baked mac and cheese the crispy top layer is the most popular part. The Maillard-browned cheese is really very good. Sometimes I'll make extra topping by grating another round of cheddar onto the top and sticking it back under the broiler, which works pretty well.

A few weeks ago I got excited about the possibility of making something with more layers: could I put down sauced pasta, then cheese, brown it, and repeat? Something a bit like lasagna?

In the spirit of reporting negative results, this turns out not to work well. The flavor is there, but the texture I was imagining, with alternating layers of chewy pasta and crispy browned cheese, is not. In retrospect this makes sense: if you put something crispy like that between two layers of sauced pasta, it's going to take in a lot of moisture from the sauce.

Still worth eating, but mildly less tasty than the normal way while also being much slower.