Gloria's Gourmet Low-Fat

This is one of the best cookbooks I've ever used. The recipes are easy and don't require "exotic" or hard to find ingredients. And the muffins are delicious; you'd never know they were lowfat! It also offers a wide variety of muffin recipes from traditional breakfast muffins to dessert muffins to muffins to accompany dinner.Wish she'd write another one for diabetics.

I compared this book with the original "Gloria's Glorious Muffins", which was printed in 1993, and I find that the original one is much better. "Low-fat" is not always good. The author says in this new book that she re-thought of using whole wheat flour, since it contains more fat than white flour. And thus more white flour is used. And for almost every recipe, more sugar was used, while in her original book I rarely found a recipe which used sugars (mostly fruit juice, honey, or maple syrup was used). In her original book, good oils such as canola oil was used properly, while in the new book, it wasn't. I would use more "good fat" and nutrient-rich whole wheat flour, than pure sugar or white flour. This book still uses good amount of whole wheat flour. But in my opinion, this is just an effort to try to follow the trend of "Low-fat" popularity, even though the author disclaims. I prefer her original "Gloria's Glorious Muffins: Easy-to-Make Easy-to-Bake Gourmet Muffin RECIPES". It provides recipes of healthier and more delicious muffins.I am not sure, maybe it was because of re-arrangement ? Or maybe not ? The new book contains totally different recipes. That is, it does not conain the "low-fat" version of recipe of the old book. They have just different recipes. Only the "Helpful Hints" section (about 30 pages) are almost same. The author, Gloria Ambrosia, claims that this book is the result of making (experimenting) thousands of muffins. And from her previous book, I trust that she is an expert in muffins. So, this new book should be a good one too. If you want to buy both, that is fine. If you want just one, I would recommend the original version, not this one.

I'm back for another copy of this book, to send to my 12-year-old nephew, who enjoyed baking from my copy. The recipes here are not just low-fat, but also make an effort to be healthy in other ways. For instance, every recipe includes some variety of whole flour, and there is a section on the pros and cons of nuts and seeds, discussing both their fat content and their nutritional plusses. The only warning I would give anyone contemplating buying this book is that you are likely to find yourself looking for exotic varieties of flour for these recipes--barley flour, brown rice flour, and the like. There are certainly a number of recipes that use just white and whole wheat flours, but for the most benefit and the least disappointment, make sure you can find at least whole wheat pastry flour.