The Sweet Life: Desserts from Chanterelle

This book exemplifies the art of the pastry chef. The dishes are more complicated that the average cook book produced for the masses but the results are fantastic if you read and understand what is going on. My favourite so far is the fresh apricot and almond tart pg 26. The flavour of the brown butter and almond custard is stunning and could form the basis for many other recipes. I recommend this book as a wonderful addition to any cooks library.

I love cookbooks, and my husband and I have tons of them that we mainly read and then occasionally consult for a particular recipe, but there are few that we really use. This will be one of them. It is not only a great and informative book to read, but it has a large collection of recipes that are easy to make even though the author cooks at Chanterelle -- a haute cuisine restaurant if there ever was one. I made the sour cream spiced apple cake this morning to bring to a New Year's Day lunch, and it came out perfectly with nary a hitch. This is one of the best dessert books that I have ever used. I am thrilled to add it to my collection and it will live in the kitchen, not on the bookshelf!

We've been using this book since we attended Kate's demo at the New York Chocolate Show. The recipes work perfectly and the scientific explanations are fun. I've made everything that my wife will let a man with high cholesterol cook. I would particularly recommend the various sorbets with fruit and herbs, but it all works! Thank you Kate!

I absolutely love this cookbook. In one weekend I tried five recipes, and all of them were fantastic! This is not just a compilation of tasty recipes - you can actually learn some tricks of the trade. Kate teaches you why you can achieve so much more depth of flavor by something as simple as browning butter. I have been so tired of recent desserts - please no more rustic fruit tarts and not another molten chocolate cake. This cookbook is filled with new and unique, easy and delicious desserts. I can tell you from experience that the hazelnut shortbread cookies, chocolate caramel pot de creme, and almond apricot tart are all outstanding!

`The Sweet Life' by Chanterelle (top New York City restaurant) pastry chef, Kate Zuckerman brilliantly succeeds in a very difficult cookbook category. A high end restaurant dessert cookbook, on the surface, would seem to have a very small audience, since the audience for making fancy desserts at home is surely even smaller than the audience for making fancy entrees, especially since it may be actually easier to buy high quality patisserie goods from a bakery than it is to buy haute cuisine take-out. But, our Kate has written an excellently diverse book of both highly detailed recipes for fancy desserts and lucid explanations of the whys and hows and wherefores of some pretty arcane baking and dessert techniques. What is even better, the geek material is presented in such an appealing manner that even the amateur who just happens to want to make a custard or a caramel or a mousse will gain from reading Ms. Zuckerman's sidebars on technique and background. Offsetting the rare interest in fancy pastry is the fact that pastry technique explanations seem to need the authoritative professional voice even more than fancy savory cooking. While I may have little interest in learning from Nobu how to acquire the knife skills I need to make sushi, I and thousands of others have a more than middling interest in how to make good homemade ice cream. And, as luck should have it, Ms. Zuckerman covers some of the really dramatic facts behind cheap versus expensive ice cream makers. I won't steal her thunder, but I will say that she names and explains how a small, inexpensive ice cream maker actually did a better job than big, expensive models. Staying with ice cream just a bit longer, she explains how ice cream is such a versatile base for so many different flavors, as if the demonstrations on `Iron Chef America' of everything from trout to avocado were not enough. Ms. Zuckerman starts off at just the right point if her intention was to impress me personally, as she begins with tarts, especially tarts with citrus curd fillings. One of my favorite desserts is a Chez Panisse recipe for a lemon curd and blueberry tart, except that Alice Waters and company don't give a lot of details on the finer points of curds. Frau Zuckerman does all this and more, especially in both explaining how curds work and how to practically test whether or not their cooking is done. The very best thing I can say about Zuckerman's treatment of her subjects is that it is as good and Sherry Yard's discussions of the same subjects in her `The Secrets of Baking'. Yard's book may be just a tad better for the average baker in that it covers so many basic recipes, but Zuckerman is easier to read and easier to see how the nerdy content applies to practical techniques. If you are a serious baker, you really should have both books, in addition to a book on basics such as `Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook' and an advanced book on bread baking, such as `Artisan Baking' by Maggie Glezer. In spite of