THE BAKER IN ME (Whitecap, 2016, 478 pages, ISBN 978-1-77050-242-0, $45 CAD hardbound) is by Daphna Rabinovitch, a pastry chef, TC personality, and director of Canadian Living Test Kitchen. She's also the co-author of two cookbooks. Baking is tough to improvise, especially when ratios are involved. Scaling is useful, such as with ingredients in breadmaking or weighing butter. She encourages you to do more and more weighing (scaling). The book is arranged by product: cookies, bars, chocolate items, muffins, biscuits, breads, cakes, and pies plus fruit desserts. She's also got stories behind each recipe, and tales of how long it took to perfect a recipe. She confesses that she's a home baker at heart. Preparations have their ingredients listed in both metric and avoirdupois measurements, but there is no table of equivalents provided.
Audience and level of use: those who aspire to become home bakers.
Some interesting or unusual recipes/facts: alfajores; shortbread; apple cake with pecan glaze; plum cornmeal cakes with rosemary; Passover chocolate chip cookies; chocolate pots de crème; blueberry pie with sour cream pastry; multi-seed bread; pumpkin pie.
The downside to this book: with all the colour photos and heavier paper, it comes in at a whopping 5.3 pounds in weight!
The upside to this book: homebaking at its finest.
Quality/Price Rating: 89.
Chimo! www.deantudor.com
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