Books in the category: cakes and desserts

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Over the past few years publishers Phaidon have been establishing a presence in the cookbook market. “The Silver Spoon For Children” is their first move into the area of cooking with children. Often, books in this area of cooking, like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s “The River Cottage Family Cookbook”, are written for adults as a guide to teaching children how to cook. This book’s approach involves having a child read it, and then prepare the recipes with the aid of an adult. By simplifying the recipes to their essence, and using large pictures and bright colours to grab attention, this book is one that has a great chance of engaging young minds.

The book takes its recipes from “The Silver Spoon”, and is aimed at children aged at least nine years old. The recipes have been tested by children, so parents can be reasonably confident that the recipes will work. As someone who has not been impressed by Phaidon’s cookbooks, this one has been surprisingly good.

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Allergy-free Desserts includes recipes for all of your favorite baked treats—cakes, cupcakes, pies, quick breads, cookies, and dessert bars. Written by Elizabeth Gordon, this indispensable cookbook will finally let you enjoy desserts safely again.

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Food historian Gaitri Pagrach-Chandra takes us on a gastronomic journey to more than twenty countries with the recipes she’s collected from her friends and artisan bakers around the world during her colorful life. For many of the recipes, she provides the history and shares the experience of tasting the authentic article. With plenty of beautiful photographs, the book will transport you out of the rut of your usual French and American breads and pastries and take you to less familiar locales.

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Tartine is a remarkable book that allows the home baker to recreate breakfast pastries, tarts, cakes, and puddings from the renowned California bakery. The authors didn’t hold back anything in making the book, taking from most of their entire menu, yet the recipes are mostly accessible and the skill level required ranges from beginner to intermediate. Most importantly, many of the desserts from the book have a rustic charm but are still delicious and beautiful enough to be showstoppers. The photography of the book, taken behind the scenes at the Tartine Bakery, captures the dream-like quality of the desserts and the remarkable skill of the artisans who make them.

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Rose’s Heavenly Cakes is Rose Levy Beranbaum’s follow-up to the acclaimed The Cake Bible, with almost 100 cakes that aim to please a wide variety of tastes. Beranbaum’s meticulous style may please some well-equipped home bakers in a temperate climate, but others might find them too fastidious, controlling, limiting, and overly complicated for what are really supposed to be simple cakes. Frustratingly, even following the recipe to the letter can give results that still leave something to be desired.

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Cake Love: How to Bake Cakes from Scratch, provides a wide range of recipes from Warren Brown’s famous Cake Love bakery. Brown takes a scientific approach to cake baking, being a self-taught baker who learned through trial and error. The recipes range from basics to unusual. For beginners, all the standard recipes are included, from frostings to pound cakes to fillings, as well as comprehensive instructions and information on basic baking techniques and equipment. The level of detail in his instructions tends to be excessive in parts, which is useful for beginners, but can be convoluted and distracting for experienced bakers. However, more advanced bakers will appreciate his original creations, such as Triple Lime-Chocolate Crunchy Feet, Cranberry-Lemon Pound Cake Loaded with Chocolate or Hazelnut Sponge Cake.

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As the year draws to and end, cookbook publishers around the world bring out their big guns to take advantage of the gift-giving season. Here at The Gastronomer’s Bookshelf we’ve compiled bucketloads of new books to help you fill out that gift-list (and maybe find a few titles you’d want to keep for yourself!). Many of these are novel or noteworthy, while some are just titles we know will be popular gifts. We’ll be featuring these books over the next month. This week we start with pastry, baking, and Christmas-related titles for you to get a head start on all the seasonal treats you might want to make.

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In honor of the 10th anniversary of the bakery’s first cookbook comes The Complete Magnolia Bakery Cookbook, a collection of recipes from New York’s sweetest bakery. In these pages you’ll find their much-loved recipes for cupcakes and more.

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Reviewer says
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The Dessert Architect gives plenty of inspiration for a student of pastry arts to create his or her own impressive creations through 50 creative recipes. It also provides a few guidelines in creating your own plated desserts and what factors must be put into consideration in a professional kitchen. However, the photography needs some improvement in showing off the desserts. Also, the lack of instructions for specific plating techniques and the exclusion of newer methods in plating and construction keep the book from becoming an authority on plating in the modern pastry chef’s bookshelf.

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In Carrément Chocolat, master patissier Pierre Hermé takes you on a journey through chocolate. He presents his beliefs and desires, reveals his sources of inspiration, and shakes up accepted beliefs.

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The Big Sur Bakery Cookbook takes you on the journey of a restaurant one month at a time with ambitious menus that capture the flavors of the season. Though some recipes might sometimes be long and involve too many steps, they are not usually out of reach of the home cook and patience will be rewarded with an impressive feast. Each month also features the profile of a person close to the restaurant and a story about the area, giving the reader a vivid portrait of a hidden culinary gem.

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This definitive collection from the undisputed queen of cakes brings together all of Mary Berry’s most mouth-watering recipes in a beautifully packaged edition. Filled with 250 foolproof recipes, this is the most comprehensive baking cookbook you’ll ever need.

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In Cake Chic, London’s queen of couture cakes, Peggy Porschen, shares the secrets of her celebrated sugar designs. From cookies to miniature cakes, to stunning tiered creations, Porschen’s style is unrestrainedly chic and girly. Her unique style and enthusiasm are inspiring and will motivate home bakers to get busy in the kitchen, rolling fondant and piping royal icing. However, despite its casual, accessible tone, this book is aimed squarely at advanced bakers, with some discrepancies between the base recipes and decorating guides requiring careful and skilled adjustment and planning.

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A collection of cakes, cookies and pastries that represent the intricacy of French-style baking, and the delicate simplicity of Japanese flavors from Keiko Ishida, the French-trained founder of Atelier K in Tokyo.

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From the national Country Women’s Association branches around Australia comes a collection of cake recipes, published by Penguin. This is one of a few CWA books to be released in 2009. The photos are attractive, despite the range of cakes being far from fancy, and there are many familiar classics alongside some novel twists. The personal touch saves the book from being just an idiosyncratic catalogue of recipes (not least fruitcakes!) and with a little care most readers would enjoy baking from it, despite a few recipe problems.

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Planet Cake is the book from the famous Sydney boutique cake shop of the same name, renowned for its elaborate sugarcraft creations and celebrity customers. The book promises beautifully decorated cakes that are “fabulous, professional, and easy”, and it seems to deliver in most respects, combining Planet Cake’s distinctive decorative style with good base recipes. The chapters of this book are very well structured, making it easy for beginners or more advanced decorators to find their way around. Whilst no-one would pretend that becoming a cake decorator is a simple feat, for the motivated home cook, Planet Cake can give you the tools to get there.

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In Indulge: 100 Perfect Desserts, Claire Clark, head pastry chef of The French Laundry, shares 100 memorable desserts from her 25 years of experience as a pastry chef. The range is wide, from her mother’s recipe for shortbread, to complex multilayered desserts worthy of a four-star hotel. As a result, the skill level required of this book ranges from novice to intermediate as well. Her skill as a pastry chef and as a teacher shines through in the text, and the result is a solid volume of desserts that have spot-on flavors.

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Reviewer says
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At 255 pages with glossy color photos on nearly ever page, there is plenty of eye candy in Pastry in Europe 2009. However, at $119.95 on Amazon US the book moves out of the price range of most frugal bakers. The book feels like a hard-bound glossy book you find in finer hotel rooms that seeks to serve the Edward Behr (Art of Eating) audience. It is a beautiful, densely packed book full of wonderful material, and not just recipes, but articles about culture, people, technique, yet they are abbreviated articles that leave you wanting more. If you have knocked out some killer mousse or chocolate bon bons, and have a fairly solid grasp of the concept and techniques, grab the book. It is unique, interesting, and informative. The book was worth the investment for one who is constantly seeking new techniques, ideas and flavor combinations, although it may not get the mileage of an Hermé book or an Art of Eating magazine

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Occasionally I have friends or acquaintances who ask me for pastry book recommendations. I cook for a living, but am also a home baker at heart. Even though I have many far more impressive looking books relating to pastry and baking, a particular one stands out amongst the rest. I turn to it when I want to whip up something comforting and it’s the book I’m confident will yield me a very pleasing result, even if it’s a previously unattempted recipe. It is also the one with batter-stained pages and the odd chocolate smudge – surely the good sign of a well loved book (or a careless cook). The book? Belinda Jeffery’s Mix & Bake.

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François Payard’s chocolate-flavored follow-up to his award-winning Simply Sensational Desserts is also a winner, packed with 99 new recipes that explore the massive potential of chocolate in an amazing variety of desserts. Payard’s French roots are definitely evident in this book, though there are a few American, Italian, and Spanish influences. Chocolate Epiphany is the perfect book for the adventurous home baker with a love for all things chocolate.

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A book of American bakery classics in the Eastern European tradition and the follow-up to the author’s James Beard Award-winning Secrets of a Jewish Baker.

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New release: Giada at Home

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Giada at Home presents recipes from Giada’s Italian and American traditions, all with her signature style. She shares classic Italian recipes passed down through the years and new family favorites, all bursting with fresh, vibrant flavors.

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New release: Canteen: Great British Food

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Canteen took the London restaurant scene by storm in 2005 – a restaurant serving proper British foodwith passion and pride. Unapologetically nostalgic, their first, much-anticipated cookbook is a splendidly comforting collection of 120 British dishes.

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New release: Ham

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Ham: An Obsession with the Hindquarter takes readers on a globetrotting tour of the whole wide wonderful world of ham in 100 recipes, from the Philippines to Spain, the Caribbean, the American South, and the authors’ home corner of rural Connecticut.

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New edition: Food for Fifty

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Now in its thirteenth edition, this classic text is the resource for learning how to prepare and serve quality food in quantity. This book provides reliable quantity recipes and methods for planning, selecting and preparing menus for all types of food services.

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New release: The Big Book of Noodles

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This exciting new book talks you through the essentials of making a delicious bowl of noodles and gives plenty of helpful tips on ingredients and cooking techniques, with over 100 inviting and varied recipes from China, Thailand, Singapore, Laos and Cambodia.

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New release: The Ministry of Food

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This book tells the story of how people coped with wartime food shortages and became healthier than ever before, with step-by-step illustrations showing how to grow your own vegetables, baking, preserving and lots of thrifty family recipes.

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New release: Japanese Cocktails

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Cocktail expert Yuri Kato collects more than 60 recipes for cocktail classics (such as the Hinomaru, the Yuzu Bath, and the Echo Julep) as well as original creations that infuse such non-Japanese spirits as vodka, rum, and tequila.

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New edition: Delights from the Garden of Eden

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Delights from the Garden of Eden is a unique Iraqi cookbook, which displays the diversity of the region’s traditional culinary practices. It contains more than 400 recipes, and indigenous ingredients and cooking techniques are explained.

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