The Perfect Recipe Baking Book: 50 Foolproof Recipes for America's Classic Cakes, Pies, Cookies, and More

Gathers recipes for cakes, pies, pastry dough, cookies and brownies, muffins, biscuits, scones, and frostings

Have you ever compared chocolate cake recipes from several cookbooks? Some call for buttermilk, others use no liquid at all. Some call for plain cocoa, others ask for sweet baking chocolate, still others specify nonalkalized cocoa. It's mind-boggling. How can a home cook, especially one in a hurry, decide which recipe is the one that will produce a perfect cake suitable for a special occasion?

Murray Jaffe wondered the same thing, which led him to write The Perfect Recipe Baking Book. Subtitled 50 Foolproof Recipes for America's Classic Cakes, Pies, Cookies, and More, it contains one reliable version of many popular items such as the aforementioned chocolate cake (water, no milk, and unsweetened cocoa), as well as pies, fruit crisps, quick breads, cookies, brownies, and muffins.

The compact book is perfect for two kinds of cooks: beginners who need the reassurance of no-fail recipes and old hands who have too many cookbooks and too little patience to page through them all. Jaffe, who wrote the book at age 79 after retiring as chief executive officer of a multimillion-dollar wholesale bakery business, has provided ample, clear instructions on the proper equipment, ingredients, and procedures that help guarantee success. The Perfect Recipe Baking Book is welcome because sometimes you just want to bake a banana cream pie or a blueberry coffee cake without conducting a research project first. --Brenda Pittsley