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... Read Full Review

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... Read Full Review

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... Read Full Review

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... Read Full Review

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... Read Full Review