The Essential Baker: The Comprehensive Guide to Baking With Chocolates, Fruits, Nuts, Spices, and other Ingredients - Hardcover

Carole Bloom

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0764576453 ISBN 13: 9780764576454

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007

Synopsis

If you are a beginning baker, this book offers an accessible introduction to essential baking ingredients, equipment, and techniques as well as detailed, step-by-step recipes that make it easy to prepare even the trickiest baked goods. If you are already an accomplished baker, it offers many sophisticated and unusual recipes that will help you refine your knowledge and skills.

The book features a distinctive organization based on six key baking ingredients, from fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, and chocolate to dairy products, spices and herbs, and coffee, tea, and liqueurs. Select an ingredient or flavor you love, and you'll find many delicious ways to incorporate it into your baking.

Bloom's recipes encompass every type of baking. You'll find spectacular versions of familiar favorites - Cherry Pie, Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting, and Double Peanut Butter Cookies - as well as intriguing variations and extravagant indulgences, including Coconut Biscotti, Lemon Verbena and Walnut Tea Cake, and Dark Chocolate Creme Brulee. Her meticulous recipes specify essential gear, offer tips on streamlining the recipe and storing the finished dish, and provide advice on varying ingredients and adding panache.

With in-depth guidance on techniques and ingredients, 225 standout recipes, variations and embellishments for almost every dish, and 32 pages of striking full-color photographs, The Essential Baker is truly the only baking book you'll ever need.

About this title

About the Author

CAROLE BLOOM is a professional pastry chef and confectioner. She studied at La Varenne École de Cuisine in Paris, Le Cordon Bleu École de Cuisine et de Pâtisserie in London, and the E. Rosa Salva Pasticceria in Venice, and has worked at the Stanford Court Hotel in San Francisco, the Beau-Rivage Palace hotel in Lausanne, and Mille Fleurs Restaurant in Rancho Santa Fe. Her articles and recipes have appeared in Bon Appétit, Fine Cooking, Eating Well, and Gourmet, and she has appeared on ABC World News This Morning, CNN, and the Today show. Her seven previous cookbooks include Truffles, Candies, and Confections.

From the Back Cover

"Carole Bloom blends years of baking experience with a reassuring and personal voice. The beginning baker will find everything needed to create fabulous desserts successfully, and the experienced baker will find dozens of enticing new recipes. The Essential Baker is brilliantly organized by key ingredient, with generous tips and hints to encourage creativity. This is a wonderful addition to any baker's library and a perfect first book for a new baker."
Alice Medrich author of Bittersweet: Recipes and Tales from a Life in Chocolate

"Want to learn to bake? Buy just one book this one. Having The Essential Baker is like having a lifetime of baking experience and teaching in your kitchen. Enough information and recipes to last any baker a lifetime."
Gale Gand, Executive Pastry Chef and partner of Tru, Host of the Food Network's Sweet Dreams, and author of Chocolate & Vanilla

"An exhaustive and tantalizing look at baking. . . . Delectable."
Publishers Weekly, starred review

From the Inside Flap

"Carole Bloom's quintessential handbook of indispensable baking fundamentals will make you the best baker you can be."
Flo Braker author of The Simple Art of Perfect Baking and Sweet Miniatures

Carole Bloom fell in love with baking as a child and has devoted her professional life to perfecting her baking skills. This cookbook is the culmination of all she has learned as a pastry chef in Europe and the United States a bountiful collection of her favorite recipes along with comprehensive guidance on home baking.

If you are a beginning baker, this book offers an accessible introduction to essential baking ingredients, equipment, and techniques as well as detailed, step-by-step recipes that make it easy to prepare even the trickiest baked goods. If you are already an accomplished baker, it offers many sophisticated and unusual recipes that will help you refine your knowledge and skills.

The book features a distinctive organization based on six key baking ingredients, from fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, and chocolate to dairy products, spices and herbs, and coffee, tea, and liqueurs. Select an ingredient or flavor you love, and you'll find many delicious ways to incorporate it into your baking.

Bloom's recipes encompass every type of baking. You'll find spectacular versions of familiar favorites Cherry Pie, Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting, and Double Peanut Butter Cookies as well as intriguing variations and extravagant indulgences, including Coconut Biscotti, Lemon Verbena and Walnut Tea Cake, and Dark Chocolate Crème Brûlée. Her meticulous recipes specify essential gear, offer tips on streamlining the recipe and storing the finished dish, and provide advice on varying ingredients and adding panache.

With in-depth guidance on techniques and ingredients, 225 standout recipes, variations and embellishments for almost every dish, and 32 pages of striking full-color photographs, The Essential Baker is truly the only baking book you'll ever need.

Reviews

Starred Review. Bloom, the author of eight cookbooks whose work has appeared in Bon Appetit, Gourmet and Food + Wine, adopts an unusual approach in this exhaustive and tantalizing look at baking. Instead of categorizing recipes by food type, she organizes them by primary ingredient—a useful approach for the baker with a craving or surplus of one ingredient. Sections include fruits and vegetables; nuts and seeds; chocolate; dairy products; spices and herbs; and coffee, tea, liqueurs and spirits. The recipes themselves are uniquely formatted in a table layout that lists the ingredients across from their steps to help with organization. Bloom includes a list of equipment needed for the dish along with instructions on storage, streamlining, altering the recipe and recovering from mishaps. The collection covers the gamut with 225 recipes, including such delectable gems as Pear and Walnut Layer Cake with Maple–Cream Cheese Icing; Coconut Biscotti; and Cranberry Nut Tea Loaf. Other highlights range from Chocolate Chip Cookies and Macadamia Nut Blondies to Malted Milk Chocolate Cheesecake and Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting. Bloom also provides valuable instruction in sections on essential ingredients, equipment and supplies, and techniques. 32 full-color photos. (Apr.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0764576453
• ISBN 13: 9780764576454
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 645