I Love Desserts: Baking Cookbook

the appetizer:

This month I Love Desserts presents Dorie Greenspan's Baking cookbook, including Dorie's Baking Hints, and these recipes: Sweet Tart Dough Sour Cream Pumpkin Pie (or Tart) and The Most Extraordinary French Lemon Cream Tart

I Love Desserts

Baking
From My Home to Yours

by Dorie Greenspan

Click to Buy This Book

She burned her parents' kitchen down when she was thirteen. She never even baked a chocolate chip cookie until she was a newly wed nineteen-year-old. Yet today, Dorie Greenspan is one of the most sought-after baking authorities in the country.

Dorie was finishing up her doctoral thesis when she found herself consumed by love of baking. She immersed herself in a complete culinary education and begged her way into famous pastry kitchens to work as an apprentice. Eventually she was hired for her first professional job, where she caught the eye of the owner, who noted approvingly, "How chic! A thin pastry chef." Always an experimenter, Dorie couldn't resist tweaking one of the restaurant's signature cakes. The customers loved the results, but Dorie immediately learned the perils of upstaging a boss. She was promptly fired for "creative insubordination."

That insubordination was the beginning of a fabulous career as a cookbook author, culminating in Baking: From My Home to Yours. Brimming with more than 300 memorable and infallible recipes, the book displays Dorie's ongoing passion for experimentation, giving variation after variation on each spirited original recipe. Dorie herself bakes at home almost every day—and has for the past thirty years. But she never loses sight of other home cooks who may be as clueless as she once was. Every recipe tells you exactly what the dessert is supposed to look like every step of the way, with perfect descriptions of texture, and reassurances like "and that's just the way it should be."

In Baking: From My Home to Yours, she's applied the techniques and tips she learned in the kitchens of the world's great chefs, in addition to her own superb baking skills. It's much like a recipe scrapbook, but one beautifully produced with full-color photographs. It's clear why the New York Times has called Dorie "a culinary guru," but more than that, she is a friend in the kitchen. The proof is in her chocolate pudding—and her extraordinary French lemon cream tart.

In Baking: From My Home to Yours you'll find treasures like

Great Grains Muffins: with three different grains, buttermilk, and a little maple syrup, they are a hearty start to the day without a trace of heaviness.

Apple Cheddar Scones: Serve them warm when the cheese is still melty.

Chocolate Chunkers: Big, gooey, exceedingly chocolatey, serially snackable, like the fabulous cookies Dorie made at the famous Sarabeth's in New York City.

Granola Grabbers: Hard to find a more perfect after-schoolish cookie than this one.

World Peace Cookies: The justifiably famous butter-rich, sandy-textured slice-and-bake cookies adapted from French pastry chef Pierre Hermé—sensationally salty.

Double Apple Bundt Cake: Your friends and family will pin a big blue ribbon on this one when you serve it. Make it with the first crop of apples from your local farmers' market all the way till summer.

Cranberry Upside-Downer: Too tired to make pie? Make this shiningly simple, festive cake to end your Thanksgiving dinner instead.

French Yogurt Cake: Here's the "secret" recipe of every home cook in France, a delightful cross between pound cake and sponge cake. It's shamelessly easy: in France cooks make it by measuring all the ingredients in a yogurt container. Dorie has adapted it to American measuring cups, and it remains absolutely foolproof.

Devil's Food White-Out Cake: The crumb-coated, devishly dark, chocolaty dig-into birthday cake adorns the cover of the book.

Sour Cream Pumpkin Pie: For every Thanksgiving table, this smooth, lavishly rich, and creamy pie is spiced like eggnog.

The Most Extraordinary French Lemon Cream Tart: We're certain you'll never taste a better one: the ne plus ultra of the lemon world, with an unbelievably velvety lemon filling. It's a perfect end to a heavy meal during the holidays—or at any time of the year.

Dorie delivers all these sensational recipes with a wealth of friendly advice. As she notes, all of them do one thing: make people very happy.

About the Author

Dorie Greenspan has written or cowritten eight cookbooks, including Baking with Julia, which won a James Beard Award and an IACP Award; Desserts by Pierre Hermé, which was named IACP Cookbook of the Year; and Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Hermé, which won the Gourmand World Cookbook Award for the best English-language cookbook. She created many recipes for The All-New Joy of Cooking and is a special correspondent for Bon Appétit, for which she writes the "Tools of the Trade" column.

Buy the Book

Baking
From My Home to Yours
by Dorie Greenspan
Photographs by Alan Richardson
Houghton Mifflin Company
Full-color, 528 pages, $40.00
ISBN: 0-618-44336-3
Information provided by the publisher.