Treasures from the oven

REVIEWS BY SYBIL PRATT

'Tis the season for pies and puddings, cakes, custards and cookies galore. In other words, the holidays are coming and there's a flurry of fabulous dessert cookbooks to give as gifts or use to delight friends and family.

Dorie Greenspan has baked with the best and has eight fabulous cookbooks to prove it. She's spent years translating the elaborate creations of great pastry chefs, making them accessible for us mere mortals, but all the while baking the "homey desserts" of her heart in her small city kitchen. Baking: From My Home to Yours is her homage to those homey treats, a treasure trove of doable desserts that will make you and everyone you bake for supremely happy. It's a big book with lots of luscious full-color photos and more than 500 recipes that range from basic biscuits to a divine dacquoise filled with fluffy white chocolate ganache and roasted pineapple. There are riffs on cheesecake that vary the crust and the flavoring, a dozen brownies from gooey to chewy, a Thanksgiving-perfect Cranberry-Lime Galette, buttery Sablés superb for Christmas giving, not to mention the tortes, tarts, crisps, crumbles and creams. Dorie thinks clearly and writes clearly, so every recipe is a foolproof gem, plus she's right there with hints for serving, storing and "playing around" with ingredients. A brand-new "timeless classic."


Behind the bakery scene

Two cookbooks by the chef-owners of two well-known bakeries reveal how they do it so you can reproduce their best-loved sweets in your own kitchen. Elisabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson, who preside over San Francisco's celebrated Tartine Bakery, share their recipes—from their glorious, signature breakfast pastries to a stunningly elegant Būche de Noël and light, cheese-flavored gougères—in Tartine. Elisabeth and Chad's enthusiasm and passion for baking makes their introductory notes wonderfully informative, even inspiring; you learn the hows and whys of each recipe and get the practical advice and insider's know-how that come from years of training and on-the-job experience.


Jennifer Appel's Buttercup Bakes at Home revels in the joys of the old-fashioned treats produced in her ever-popular New York bakery. Here, she serves up 75 favorites—including meringues, muffins, Milky Way Cupcakes, Mississippi Mud Cake and more—that are as comforting as they are fun to make.


Chocoholics rejoice!

In the olden days (my youth, alas), there was milk chocolate, dark chocolate and the bitter stuff for baking. But in this nuanced, postmodern world nothing is that simple—now we have chocolate that comes in degrees of intensity from plain old 55 percent semisweet to 62, 70, 82 and a knock-your-chocolate-loving-socks-off 99 percent. Robert Steinberg and John Scharffenberger, the founding fathers of Scharffen Berger, a leader among the upscale, artisanal producers of these dark delights, want you to have the right recipes to showcase high-quality chocolate. In The Essence of Chocolate they provide more than 100 recipes, from sublimely sweet to savory, gathered from their own files and collected from renowned chefs around the country. I love the way they've divided these recipes: "Intensely Chocolate," features the robustly rich like Chocolate Pudding Cake, Chocolate Pecan Pie and sinfully dense Chocolate Mousse. "Essentially Chocolate" favors a slightly lighter approach, Orange Chocolate Baklava, a grilled Chocolate and Peanut Butter Panini and Chocolate Zabaglione Trifle; and in "A Hint of Chocolate" you use a little to get a lot more depth in a challah, scones, waffles, mini madeleines and more. You'll also find out much about the making of fine chocolate, from selecting the beans to molding the bar, and much about these two impassioned champions of chocolate.


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