The Essential Baker: The Comprehensive Guide to Baking With Chocolates, Fruits, Nuts, Spices, and other Ingredients

by Carole Bloom

If you are a beginning baker, this book offers an accessible introduction to essential baking ingredients, equipment, and techniques as well as detailed, step-by-step recipes that make it easy to prepare even the trickiest baked goods. If you are already an accomplished baker, it offers many sophisticated and unusual recipes that will help you refine your knowledge and skills. The book features a distinctive organization based on six key baking ingredients, from fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, and chocolate to dairy products, spices and herbs, and coffee, tea, and liqueurs. Select an ingredient or flavor you love, and you'll find many delicious ways to incorporate it into your baking. Bloom's recipes encompass every type of baking. You'll find spectacular versions of familiar favorites - Cherry Pie, Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting, and Double Peanut Butter Cookies - as well as intriguing variations and extravagant indulgences, including Coconut Biscotti, Lemon Verbena and Walnut Tea Cake, and Dark Chocolate Creme Brulee. Her meticulous recipes specify essential gear, offer tips on streamlining the recipe and storing the finished dish, and provide advice on varying ingredients and adding panache. With in-depth guidance on techniques and ingredients, 225 standout recipes, variations and embellishments for almost every dish, and 32 pages of striking full-color photographs, The Essential Baker is truly the only baking book you'll ever need.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking

645 pages, Hardcover

First published March 19, 2007

Reviews

[Aasinathena · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must own book ! Comprehensive and covers knows-it-all areas of baking !!! Truly is ESSENTIAL !

[Annchan Maulana · Rating 4 out of 5]

presents more than 250 recipes, along with a thorough introduction to baking techniques, equipment, and ingredients

(645 pages !!!! with 225 recipes, including such delectable gems as Pear and Walnut Layer Cake with Maple–Cream Cheese Icing; Coconut Biscotti; and Cranberry Nut Tea Loaf. Other highlights range from Chocolate Chip Cookies and Macadamia Nut Blondies to Malted Milk Chocolate Cheesecake and Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting. Bloom also provides valuable instruction in sections on essential ingredients, equipment and supplies, and techniques. 32 full-color photos.)

[Patti · Rating 1 out of 5]

For some reason my public library decided to display this book around the holiday season in 2018. This book is jumbled and many ingredients lists are broken up into two pages among other serious faults. I continue to wonder why my library’s bent on displaying outdated books in lieu of current cookbooks and other books . Leads me to think that library staff doesn’t seem to read books much.

[Mrs. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Comprehensive book with tons of useful info. The cons: all the recipes call for extra large eggs, which is OK if you prep in advance, and there are hardly any photos considering the huge volume of recipes in the book.

[Catherine Woodman · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is a simple well written cookbook that is well organized (I like the way it is done by the kind of ingredient rather than what you are making with t-I cook with what I have rather than shopping to cook)