Desserts: Mediterranean Flavors, California Style

Cindy Mushet has a great book...easy to read, with clear instructions and good hints in the sidebars. If you want to make beautiful and tasty desserts with a Mediterranean flair, buy this. It delivers what it offers, pure and simple. If you want "exact" Mediterranean recipes, look elsewhere, both for another book and also for the hard to get items such as proper blood oranges, specific types of flour, vanilla beans instead of vanilla extract, etc to go with such "authentic" precision. I don't need such for my cooking. I'm happy with 5 different baklava as follow: ...Antibes with almonds, hazlenuts, cinnamon and cloves...Pistachio and apricot with orange cardamon syrup.....quince and walnut.....sour cherry and almond.....hazelnut and chocolate. Not bad, eh, and you can create your own variations. Try Konafa with tangerine lime syrup, tiropetes with chocolate and apricot filling, various biscotti variations as well. For cakes, try strawberry mascarpone layer cake, fregolatta with almonds and jam...grilled coconut cake with double-lime ice cream, almond brown butter cakes with raspberries, pomegranate dacquoise (a beautiful and tasty variation on the classic French dessert)...the variety is more than enough, and the instructions are doable for advanced beginner to intermediate cooks. As this is published in 2000, there's not an abundance of pictures. That's not a problem, as Cindy gives serving and even storage suggestions to make you look like a pro! This is better quality than "storebought", and you can taste the difference. Start with the cover..the Roasted pears with spiced sabayon...and learn about sabayon preparation, and how to buy a proper pear corer, too!

I first purchased this book because of the great title. At the time I bought this book, I was a student studying baking and pastry for the first time at a college in Sonoma County. I wanted a tasty impactful recipe to present at my backshop management class and decided to try Mushet's "Marbleized Chocolate Velvet Tart" pg 104. It came out perfectly! I have since tried the pistaccio ice-cream recipe that has become my favorite ice-cream. Other recipes that I tested came out equally well. Her recipes are easy to understand and do not have much extra information. I obviously like the book and her style. By the way this is the first book review that I have felt compelled to write.

I've gone through several dessert cookbooks and this is by far the best one. I consistently get "wow"s from the recipes. You will not find these recipes in any other cookbook. I hesitated on some of the recipes because they sounded too "weird", but when I ended up making them, they produced wonderful flavors. I've even seen some of the recipes show up in upscale New York City restaurants. A woman at work told me "That's the best baklava I've ever had and I'm from Greece!" All the instructions are easy to follow and the desserts don't take forever to prepare like a lot of other cookbooks. Cindy Mushet - please do another cookbook!

Cindy Mushet has accomplished a difficult task - that of creating a dessert cookbook chock-full of truly original flavor combinations, warm prose and explicit instructions. Several recipes grabbed me off the bat: a pistachio cake with a nougat cream enhanced with the flavors of honey, Amaretto and orange; one of several baklavas with pistachios and apricot with an orange cardamom syrup and a filo pastry with figs, almond paste and lemon. For chocolate fanatics there's a marbleized chocolate velvet tart and a chocolate souffle roll with rum and mascarpone. This book will complement any already in your library and I will certainly refer to it often. Buy it; you will love it!

I am very glad that Cindy finally came out with her own cookbook. This book is a consolation after she ended her wonderful new letter "baking with an Americam harvest". It is refresing to get a dessert book that doesn't get its inspiration from overused France but instead uses the middle east. That is not common and the use of flavors and ideas from that overlooked part of the world makes this dessert book valuable as well as unique. I am looking forward to using it. Robin