Rose Levy Beranbaum

Books: Cookbooks | Baking | Bread | Desserts

The Cake Bible (1988), The Pie and Pastry Bible (1998), Rose's Christmas Cookies (1998), The Bread Bible (2003)

The Cake Bible (1988)

I really like Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Cake Bible (1988). It has some excellent recipes, and she explains the why of cake flour versus all purpose flour. I love the recipe for Domingo cake.

Rose's Christmas Cookies (1998)

You can tell it's getting colder–I'm starting to obsess over baking books and looking and possible Christmas cookies. (NOTE: This is the ONLY Christmas thing I am interested in. I don't want to hear Christmas music or see decorations until AFTER Thanksgiving.)

I very much liked the pictures, as they looked like cookies a normal human could manage to make (that's always a big thing with me–I am daunted by perfect looking food.)

There are a lot of regional type recipes here, (although there was no recipe for kruscuki), which I enjoyed looking at, although many of the recipes didn't look to be my kind of cookies, though they looked fun to try and make.

There were several ideas I saw that I really liked–one of which was edible tempura color–you decorate/paint your cookies before baking. I find that very appealing, although I totally suck at decorating cookies and cakes.

I also found a recipe for pecan tassies–I have had on many occasions little nut roll cookies at Christmas, but have yet to find a recipe that looks like what I enjoy eating. This looks close, and could possibly be modified to what I'm thinking. We'll see.

The other recipe that caught my fancy was a meringue with processed bittersweet chocolate. That looks REALLY interesting.

There are several other recipes I think I'd like to try, but every year I come up with seemingly hundreds of Christmas cookies I want to make, and have to limit it to about ten different kinds of cookies.

We'll see how things turn out.

Published by William Morrow

Rating: 7/10