If you think about it, all you do is add a carbon, so what you need is a nucleophile that can attack at the carbonyl carbon that looks like an R group.
A straightforward solution is R−MgBr, an alkyl Grignard reagent that acts like an alkyl anionic nucleophile.
where R1 and R2 merely differentiate between unique R groups. The only problem is that the tetrahedral intermediate, after being protonated, no longer possesses a carbonyl group. So you have to oxidize it to turn it back into one.
Overall:
PCC looks like this:
What's special about it is that it oxidizes alcohols one step forward, i.e. primary alcohol to aldehyde, or secondary alcohol to ketone.
One way you could do it is using trifluoroperoxyacetic acid (a Baeyer-Villiger oxidation), and then using diisobutylaluminium hydride (DIBAH) in Toluene in the presence of a dry ice bath. take acetone and convert it to acetaldehyde:
Neither mechanism is particularly well-known, but in general, in step 1, an oxygen is inserted in between a carbonyl and an adjacent carbon, and then for step 2, the −O−R group is reduced to H.