Holiday Baking Pick: "Baked: New Frontiers in Baking"
This weekend, in anticipation of turning my kitchen into a cookie factory for holiday baking, I spent some time flipping through my cookbook collection seeking inspiration. I don't want to reveal the actual recipes I decided upon (just in case you're a reader who's on my cookie list) but the books that made this year's cut were Baking: From My Home to Yours, Dolce Italiano: Sweets from the Babbo Kitchen, The Craft of Baking, and Baked: New Frontiers in Baking.
Baked remains one of my favorite cookbooks of recent years--from the stag wallpaper endpapers to the retro, urban-rustic aesthetic of the design of the book to the recipes themselves: Root Beer Bundt Cake, Butterscotch Pudding Tarts, the much-heralded Baked Brownie, Millionaire's Shortbread, Brewer's Blondies, and Peanut Butter Crispy Bars, to call out a few favorites. (One of my favorite tricks I picked up from the book was buying a tackle box to store all of my special-occasion baking essentials: pastry bags and tips, cookie cutters, food coloring, candy thermometer. This frees up precious cupboard space in an already cramped city kitchen.) Former admen Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito opened Baked in Brooklyn in 2005. Much to my disappointment, I haven't taken the trip out to Red Hook to experience their bakery firsthand, but last year over Thanksgiving in Charleston, I made near-daily visits to their then-newly opened East Bay Street outpost.
In the December issue of Food & Wine, Kate Krader writes about a Christmas day potluck that Matt Lewis and Renato throw for their staff. The sweets on the menu included chocolate-gingerbread cookies (in woodland creature cut-outs, naturally) and a Chocolate-Malt Stump de Noël. And, if you follow Matt on Twitter you'll know that they spent a big chunk of 2009 recipe-testing and writing the sequel to Baked, which will be coming out in Fall 2010.
Recommended for fans of The Craft of Baking and Baking: From My Home to Yours.
--BTP
Lea on December 17, 2009 at 05:47 PM
In the kitchen, cook books contribute much to the kind of food we prepare.