Baking: From my home to yours

Posted by Margalit

Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From my home to yours is one of those fabulous books that will immediately find plenty of use in your home kitchen. Greenspan, who helped Julia Childs write Baking with Julia, is a masterful home baker and this book contains the kinds of recipes that will not only wow dinner guests, but will be perfectly at home for a school bake sale. These are the kinds of recipes that your family will beg you to bake time and again, recipes that your older kids will be able to handle on their own in the kitchen, and recipes where a few common baking ingredients will allow you to create almost everything in the book.

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A friend of mine recommended this book when I was moaning about being sick of the same old bar cookies. I find bar cookies easy to make, but how many brownies, lemon squares, and mini-cheesecakes can one endure before longing for something different. So when I picked up this book at the bookstore, the deciding factor was the recipe for White Chocolate Brownies with fresh raspberries. Oh man, those looked so good I had to buy the book and try them.

This book is well-written with easy-to-follow recipes. It is organized around several chapters that contain recipes for Breakfast Sweets, Cookies, Cakes, Pies and Tarts, Spoon Desserts, and Indespensables. The recipes are presented with a small introduction, the ingredients, step-by-step instructions, and some extra commentary. Each recipe has a color photo of the finished product. Some of the recipes are extra special and would be excellent for your holiday table. Chocolate Caramel Chestnut Cake would be a fabulous addition to a Christmas dinner, for example. For Thanksgiving, four holiday pies are presented together: The Thanksgiving TwoFer Pie (Pecan and Pumkin together), a Caramel Pumpkin Pie, Sour Cream Pumpkin Pie, and Pecan Pie. Reading through these recipes made me long for crisp fall days and a big turkey on the table!

I have a feeling that this is going to be one of my favorite baking cookbooks. Nothing looks too complicated or too overly fancy. I like the idea of solid, straightforward recipes for foods we already know we're going to love. That's my kinda cookbook!

TAGS: Baking, Cook Book, Dorie Greenspan
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