The Essential Baker: The Comprehensive Guide to Baking with Chocolate, Fruit, Nuts, Spices, and Other Ingredients

This book should be called the BIBLE of Baking - it literally covers all the bases. Great book for any baker.

There are so many recipes here that I had a difficult time deciding what I wanted to make first. There have been a few recipes I made which I didn't love but others enjoyed quite a bit. No loss of stars due to personal preferences. For me, my three personal favorites so far would be the Oatmeal Walnut Cookies, the Fig and Anise Cake and the Chocolate Nib Cookies. I'm looking forward to baking up more Keeper Recipes as I work my way through this great addition to my library.

I have a lot of cookbooks, mostly on desserts. When I saw this book I thought it was just another dessert cookbook with the same old recipes and pictures. Was I wrong. This is quickly becoming my favorite dessert cookbook mainly because it is so easy to use and it has such a wide variety of recipes. It's arranged in such a logical way with recipes divided up by their primary ingredient. For example, I like tropical fruits so I just go to the tropical and exotic fruit section and all the recipes with tropical fruits are there. My favorite here is the Coconut Biscotti but that Pineapple Tarte Tatin is so, so yummy also. I like anything with chocolate and there is a big section with many recipes. The White Chocolate and Lemon Tart is to die for. Another thing so neat about this book is the way the recipes are laid out in a kind of table format which makes them so easy to follow. I am really happy with this book. I am thinking it may be the only dessert cookbook I will every need. I intend to make all of the over 250 recipes (and some of the variations too). I highly recommended this to all dessert bakers. It is really easy to use and there is something for everyone.

"The Essential Baker: The Comprehensive Guide to Baking with Chocolate, Fruit, Nuts, Spices and Other Ingredients" is a new book by Carole Bloom, who is a professional pastry chef and confectioner. As the title promises the contents include an impressive array of recipes that use everything from coffee & tea to vegetables & fruits as their main ingredients. More than this, however, Bloom's recipes are unique, with a dash of sliced almonds adding both flavor and texture to banana muffins and pearl sugar enhancing the visual appeal of apple turnovers. I loved her recipes for coconut biscotti, jasmine tea cakes and spiced sugar coin cookies. Indeed, though I usually give away most of the goodies I bake, I couldn't bring myself to share the biscotti with anyone other than my husband. On a few occasions I wasn't entirely thrilled with the way a recipe turned out, but given my delight with other recipes I have to chalk this up to taste. One cannot expect every single recipe in a book to enthrall, after all, and modifications can always be made to suit your preferences. Bloom's instructions are clear and easy to follow, though the way ingredients are presented took some getting used to. Instead of listing ingredients before the recipe, as most cookbooks do, recipes are divided into stages with the ingredients for each stage listed beside the instructions. At first I didn't like this aspect of the book, but as I continued to cook with it I realized that this arrangement a) forced me to read through the entire recipe before beginning, I'm a notorious improviser, and b) made it nearly impossible to become confused about which ingredient should be used where. Essential gear is listed along side the recipe, where helpful information is also included: storage tips, variations, and instructions for streamlining the baking process over more than one afternoon (i.e. How to begin cookies one day and finish them the next.) While I'm always appreciative of baking books that have photos for every recipe, the straightforward presentation of Bloom's recipes made it easy to visualize the final result without an image. Photos for twenty recipes are collected in the center of the book, representing the various chapters, which include: fruit & vegetables; nuts & seeds; chocolate; dairy products (milk, cream, cheeses); spices & herbs; and coffee, tea, liqueurs & spirits. The first chapter is devoted entirely to baking techniques, language and an overview of essential baking gear. Recipes range in difficulty from easy to challenging, so this may not be the best book for a novice baker. Yet those with baking experience and a curiosity for novel recipes may want to check it out. From Key Lime Squares and Raspberry-Blueberry Galettes to Pomegranate Butter Cookies and Triple Vanilla Souffle, there is something in this book to pique everyone's interests.

`The Essential Baker' by professional pastry chef and culinary writer, Carole Bloom presents itself as a complete baking manual, with a distinctively different organization, by ingredient. For its size, price, and claims, the book begs us to compare it to the recent `Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook', which is also a comprehensive introductory baking text. As I first open the book, Bloom's `Essential Baker' does not readily impress me when stacked up against Team Stewart. Like Stewart, the book does not delve into a lot of the more technical explanations of baking science (as one may find in Rose Levy Beranbaum's more advanced `Bibles' on baking technique), but then the average baker really doesn't need most of this, as long as they get the message that with baking, one really needs to follow the recipe closely, even down to the size of the baking pans. Bloom does go into just a bit more detail, and may get herself into a few questionable statements, as when she states that one should not use all purpose flour for baking bread (every book I've ever seen on bread baking uses and condones `all purpose flour', with a preference for the higher protein products such as those from King Arthur.) Based on their enormous magazine publishing resources, it's no surprise to find Team Stewart's book with wonderful pictures all along the way, especially with good series of tutorials on some basic techniques. Ms. Bloom oddly has virtually no pictures, and all she has are in two middle of the book rotogravure sections, to keep the cost down. Two more comparisons tend to favor Team Stewart. The first is that their organization is by end product and method rather than by principal ingredient. For an introductory manual, I simply find that more useful and intuitive. Unlike savory cooking, one is much more inclined to begin with `lets bake a cake' or `lets make a pie' or `lets make some cookies' or `lets make some bread'. One of the few cases where this may not be true is with some highly seasonal local ingredients such as rhubarb. Otherwise, my baking choices are largely based on birthdays needing cake, picnics needing pies, and Christmas needing cookies. The second is that Ms. Bloom does not cover yeast breads at all. There are recipes for quick breads such as biscuits and Irish Soda bread (under the subject of buttermilk), but that's it. Team Stewart has a 70 page chapter on yeast breads with 31 recipes, including muffins, bagels, pizza, Danish, croissants, and babkas. If this were the whole story, Team Stewart would have it all over Ms. Bloom. Ms. Bloom, however, has an ace up her sleeve. Only after reading the long and highly informative (but pictureless) introductory chapters in `The Essential Baker' did I discover that Ms. Bloom is hiding her light under a basket. While celebrating her ordering by ingredient, she neglects to trumpet the fact that her method for writing recipes is really superior. Everything is laid out in exactly the way one may wish to f

Though I love to cook and entertain, I seldom bake. Somehow, in planning my meals, dessert is often an afterthought. Thus, when a friend gave me Carole Bloom's latest tome, The Essential Baker: The Comprehensive Guide to Baking with Chocolate, Fruit, Nuts, Spices, and other ingredients, I thanked her profusely and thought I would relegate the exhaustive 650 page book to the upper reaches of my kitchen shelf. Last week, in need of an easy dessert recipe, the stunning chocolate madeleines on Bloom's book cover came to mind. What delights might I find within its pages, I wondered? I thumbed through it, looking for something simple to complement a bowl of fresh strawberries. The Coconut Biscotti on page 229 caught my eye. I followed Bloom's instructions to the letter. The author of Chocolate Lovers' Cookbook for Dummies, among eight other books, made it all the easier thanks to her clever organization: ingredients and their corresponding usage are laid out side by side on the page rather than one following the other as is usually the case. I assembled the dough in minutes, shaped it into two loaves as instructed, and popped them in the oven. I waited for them to cool before slicing them into biscotti, and returned them to the oven a few minutes longer. Twenty minutes later, "my" biscotti looked like those sold by the piece at an extravagant price in upscale coffee shops--sweet and crumbly and ready for dunking. "Those are the best biscotti I have ever tasted," opined my husband, a cookie connoisseur from way back. The Essential Baker may not turn me into a pro but the clarity of recipes inspire me to try the Cherry Clafouti(page 61) and the Pineapple Tarte Tatin (page 247). I may even read through Bloom's extensive Baking Essentials section to expand my newfound skills!