BAKING FROM MY HOME TO YOURS HC GREENSPA

“It is a truth universally acknowledged”, as dear Jane might have it, that there are an awful lot of cookbooks out there vying for your attention. I would suggest, however, that this is the perfect time to recycle, reshuffle, and remove one or two unloved or underutilized cookbooks from your collection and replace them with Baking: From My Home to Yours (HB $40) by Dorie Greenspan. You will need to clear a fairly large space, as this is a generous book in every possible way. Each section—breakfast sweets, cookies, cakes, pies, tarts, and spoon desserts—contains a page or two of introduction, several pages of very helpful exposition (“Biscuits and Scones, A How-To for Flakiness”, for example), drool-worthy full-color photos, and, of course, the fantastic recipes themselves, each one of which has a “serving”, “storing”, and “playing around” sidebar. From the Chocolate Layer Cake on the cover to Honey Peach Ice Cream—the last formal recipe before the “Indispensables, Base Recipes” section—you will want to grab your whisk and bowl and start baking. In fact, there’s a group of 400 bloggers who bake a different recipe from this book each week. If you’ve made the Korova Cookies from Paris Sweets (reviewed in A La Carte April ’07), you’ve already begun cooking from Baking where the Korova has been renamed the World Peace Cookie. On her website (http://www.doriegreenspan.com/) Dorie states that there are 463,000 links on Google for this cookie alone, which is a bit mind-boggling, but only until you’ve tried it. From the cookie section I’ve also made the Peanut Butter Crisscrosses, an earnest little cookie that is everything a peanut butter cookie should be. I then tried Dorie’s Basic Biscuits, which I considered a true test as my biscuits in the past have ranged, depressingly, from fairly awful to totally inedible. After reading the how-to and following the recipe exactly, I had before me biscuits that looked and tasted terrific. Well, that was gratifying, what to try next? I’d begun bringing the book up from the kitchen for nighttime reading and list making, and the recipe for Perfect Party Cake, with its stunning picture, proved irresistible. The finished product was high, light, beautiful and delicious. The next time I make it, however, I intend to use unsweetened shredded coconut* for the topping, rather than the sweetened version called for. I found this a bit too sweet, as well as clumpy, although the brief drying out I gave it in my turned-off oven helped. Merely a quibble, however, and a minor one at that. I could go on, and I have, with such delights as Good for Almost Everything Pie Dough (preceded by some invaluable pointers), Creamy Dark Chocolate Sorbet (perhaps not quite an ordinary baked good, but yummy nonetheless) and Cardamom Crumb Cake, with its intriguing, not-too-sweet flavor. As with all really good cookbooks, Dorie’s recipes are extremely clear, well-written and easy to follow, but this alone would not necessarily lead you to the shelf clearing I’ve suggested. What sets Dorie apart and makes this a book you feel you must have is her absolute passion for what she does and her generosity, insight and skill in sharing this passion with her readers. She loves to bake, and she loves these recipes, which she’s used over and over, fine-tuning and perfecting them. She’s confident we feel the same way, and, if we’re not quite there, here she is, our friend in the kitchen, distilling her vast culinary wisdom with enormous good humor and joie de vivre. I suspect that you, like me, will want to bake with Dorie through the pages of this invaluable cookbook.