Sweets

Hello, Cupcake!: Irresistibly Playful Creations Anyone Can Make

Witty, one-of-a-kind imaginative cupcake designs using candies from the local convenience store.

America's favorite food photography team, responsible for the covers of America's top magazines, shows how to create funny, scary, and sophisticated masterpieces, using a zipper lock bag and common candies and snack items.With these easy-to-follow techniques, even the most kitchen-challenged cooks can

• raise a big-top circus cupcake tier for a kid's birthday
• plant candy vegetables on Oreo earth cupcakes for a garden party
• trot out a line of confectionery "pupcakes" for a dog fancier
• serve sausage and pepperoni pizza cupcakes for April Fool's Day
• bewitch trick-or-treaters with chilly ghost chocolate cupcakes
• create holidays on icing with turkey cupcake place cards, a white cupcake Christmas wreath, and Easter egg cupcakes

No baking skills or fancy pastry equipment is required. Spotting the familiar items in the hundreds of brilliant photos is at least half the fun.

Ben & Jerry's Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book

With little skill, surprisingly few ingredients, and even the most unsophisticated of ice-cream makers, you can make the scrumptious ice creams that have made Ben & Jerry's an American legend.

BEN & JERRY'S HOMEMADE ICE CREAM & DESSERT BOOK tells fans the story behind the company and the two men who built it-from their first meeting in 7th-grade gym class (they were already the two widest kids on the field) to their "graduation" from a $5.00 ice-cream-making correspondence course to their first ice-cream shop in a renovated gas station.

But the best part comes next. Dastardly Mash, featuring nuts, raisins, and hunks of chocolate. The celebrated Heath Bar Crunch. New York Super Fudge Chunk. Oreo Mint. In addition to Ben & Jerry's 11 greatest hits, here are recipes for ice creams made with fresh fruit, with chocolate, with candies and cookies, and recipes for sorbets, sundaes, and baked goods. The 90-plus authentic recipes are spiced with Lyn Severance's bright, quirky, full-color illustrations. Over 383,000 copies in print.

Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking

Martha Stewart's Cookies: The Very Best Treats to Bake and to Share (Martha Stewart Living Magazine)

The perfect cookie for every occasion.

Cookies are the treat that never disappoints. Whether you’re baking for a party or a picnic, a formal dinner or a family supper–or if you simply want something on hand for snacking–there is a cookie that’s just right. In Martha Stewart’s Cookies, the editors of Martha Stewart Living give you 175 recipes and variations that showcase all kinds of flavors and fancies. Besides perennial pleasers like traditional chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin, there are other sweet surprises, including Rum Raisin Shortbread, Peppermint Meringue Sandwiches with Chocolate Filling, and Lime Meltaways.

Cleverly organized by texture, the recipes in Martha Stewart’s Cookies inspire you to think of a classic, nostalgic treat with more nuance. Chapters include all types of treasures: Light and Delicate (Cherry Tuiles, Hazelnut Cookies, Chocolate Meringues); Rich and Dense (Key Lime Bars, Chocolate Mint Sandwiches, Peanut Butter Swirl Brownies); Chunky and Nutty (Magic Blondies, Turtle Brownies, White Chocolate-Chunk Cookies); Soft and Chewy (Snickerdoodles, Fig Bars, Chewy Chocolate Gingerbread Cookies); Crisp and Crunchy (ANZAC Biscuits, Chocolate Pistachio Biscotti, Almond Spice Wafers); Crumbly and Sandy (Cappuccino-Chocolate Bites, Maple-Pecan Shortbread, Lemon-Apricot Sandwiches); and Cakey and Tender (Lemon Madeleines, Carrot Cake Cookies, Pumpkin Cookies with Brown-Butter Icing).

Each tantalizing recipe is accompanied by a lush, full-color photograph, so you never have to wonder how the cookie will look. Beautifully designed and a joy to read, Martha Stewart’s Cookies is rich with helpful tips and techniques for baking, decorating, and storing, as well as lovely gift-packaging ideas in standout Martha Stewart style.

The Cake Mix Doctor

Cake mixes are undoubtedly convenient, but do they produce good cakes? They can, says Anne Byrn, author of The Cake Mix Doctor, if you know how to tweak them. Doing this involves the addition of ingredients to enrich the mixes and flavorings to enhance and, in some cases, conceal questionable tastes. To prove her point, Byrn offers more than 175 recipes for mix-based cakes and other desserts, including formulas for frostings that, Byrn maintains, must be made from scratch. The results are convincing; readers interested in satisfying, dependable desserts prepared quickly and with little fuss should welcome the book.

Beginning with a useful discussion of cake mixes, their history and composition, and an outline of the mix-transformation battle plan, the book then presents the recipes in chapters such as "Chocolate Cakes," "Cake-Mix Classics," "Special Occasion Cakes," and "Incredible Bars and Comforting Cookies." Among the most successful offerings are Deeply Chocolate Almond Cake with Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting, Banana Cake with Quick Caramel Frosting, and Lemon Buttermilk Poppy Seed Cake. A chapter devoted to crumbles, crisps, cobblers, trifles, and even a dessert pizza shows how to use the mixes in innovative ways, and "Lighter Cakes" presents "healthier" offerings, such as Pear and Toasted Pecan Buttermilk Cake. With sidebars such as The Legendary Pillsbury Bake-Off and tips for success throughout ("Cinnamon is one of the great tools to use when doctoring up cake mixes," begins one), the book explores every aspect of cake-mix fixing while revealing the unexpected richness that the process can yield. --Arthur Boehm

The Cake Mix Doctor is in! And the prescription is simple: By doctoring up packaged cake mix with just the right extras--a touch of sweet butter here, cocoa powder there, or poppy seeds, vanilla yogurt, sherry, eggs, and grated lemon zest for the Charleston Poppy Seed Cake--even the least experienced baker can turn out luscious signature desserts, time after time. The proof is in the taste, and the taste never stops--from Toasted Coconut Sour Cream Cake to Devilishly Good Chocolate Cake; from a to-die-for Caramel Cake and a Holiday Yule Log to cheesecakes, coffee cakes, sheet cakes, pound cakes, bars, brownies, and those all-important frostings, here are 175 fast, foolproof recipes that will transform the art of home baking in America.

Who could believe these cakes came out of a box? Moist, tender, rich, deep, and complexly flavored, without a hint of artificiality, each cake stand up and delivers. But without any of the fuss of baking from scratch. Anne Byrn, an award-wining food writer and self-described purist, creates recipes that employ a cake mix's strengths---convenience, ease-of-use, dependability, and almost imperviousness to overbeating, underbeating, overbaking, and underbaking.

In addition to the recipes are the Cake Mix Doctor's Q&A's, extensive "Doctor Says" tips, lists--15 Beautiful Birthday Cakes, 15 Cakes That Will Cash in at a Bake Sale--and more, all illustrated in a full-color photographic insert.

Perfect Scoop: Ice Creams, Sorbets, Granitas, and Sweet Accompaniments

The Perfect Scoop - Ice Creams, Sorbets, Granitas, and Sweet Accompaniments by David Lebovitz"Ripe seasonal fruits. Fragrant vanilla, toasted nuts, and spices. Heavy cream and bright liqueurs. Chocolate, chocolate, and more chocolate. Every luscious flavo

The Joy of Vegan Baking: The Compassionate Cooks' Traditional Treats and Sinful Sweets

Baking: From My Home to Yours

In Baking with Julia (Child, of course) and Desserts by Pierre Hermé, Dorrie Greenspan gave voice to other baking experts while ensuring their recipes worked. Now, in Baking: From My Home to Yours, she steps fully onstage with a collection of 230-plus immediately attractive recipes ranging from breakfast sweets, cakes, and tarts to puddings, custards, ice creams, and crisps. This is homey, eminently doable baking that encompasses the more familiar, like sugar-topped molasses spice cookies, pecan sticky buns, and lemon tart, but also includes the temptingly original, such as Devil's Food White-Out Cake, Coconut-Roasted Pineapple Dacquoise, and Toasted Almond Scones. Her cookie selection, which offers the standout Chocolate Malted Whopper Drops, is particularly good, as is her brownie group, a mini-chapter featuring a very edible espresso cheesecake variation.

Greenspan knows her stuff, of course, but it's her droll, anecdotal style (readers learn, for example how a chocolate cake got her fired) and her recipe-making expertise that sets the book apart. Precise descriptions of the baked goods--a pound cake, for example, is said to have a "moist, tightly knit crumb"--help readers understand baking anatomy. Equally exact, and reassuring, are her recipe guideposts--she notes, for example, that rubbing butter into the dry ingredients when making a biscuit recipe will result in "pea-size pieces, pieces the size of oatmeal flakes, and pieces the size of everything in between." With recipe variations and enticing color photos, the book will inspire--and inform--baking novices and experts alike. --Arthur Boehm

Dorie Greenspan has written recipes for the most eminent chefs in
the world: Pierre Hermé, Daniel Boulud, and arguably the greatest
of them all, Julia Child, who once told Dorie, "You write recipes
just the way I do." Her recipe writing has won widespread praise for its
literate curiosity and "patient but exuberant style." (One hard-boiled
critic called it "a joy forever.") In Baking: From My Home to Yours, her
masterwork, Dorie applies the lessons from three decades of experience
to her first and real love: home baking. The 300 recipes will
seduce a new generation of bakers, whether their favorite kitchen tools
are a bowl and a whisk or a stand mixer and a baker's torch.

Even the most homey of the recipes are very special. Dorie's
favorite raisin swirl bread. Big spicy muffins from her stint as a baker in
a famous New York City restaurant. French chocolate brownies (a
Parisian pastry chef begged for the recipe). A dramatic black and white
cake for a "wow" occasion. Pierre Hermé's extraordinary lemon tart.
The generous helpings of background information, abundant stories,
and hundreds of professional hints set Baking apart as a one-of-a-kind
cookbook. And as if all of this weren't more than enough, Dorie has
appended a fascinating minibook, A Dessertmaker's Glossary, with
more than 100 entries, from why using one's fingers is often best, to
how to buy the finest butter, to how the bundt pan got its name.

Pops!: Icy Treats for Everyone

Pops! introduces a whole new Popsicle one that's fashionable as well as fun. This first-ever ice pop compendium includes more than 100 recipes for pops with unique tastes and flavor combinations, such as Sour Plum, Sweet Martini, Thai Iced Coffee, and Blueberry Cheesecake cool treats today's grown-up kids will be proud to serve at their birthday gatherings, barbecues, and cocktail parties.

And for those whose creative interests stretch beyond the kitchen and into the DIY realm, Pops! offers innovative techniques for making ice molds from found objects and even small toys. With more than 30 full-color photographs and tons of quirky sidebars, Pops! features frosty indulgences for every occasion.

The Cake Bible

Rose Levy Beranbaum is a kitchen chemist extraordinaire--this, after all, is the woman who wrote her master's thesis on the effects of sifting on the quality of yellow cake. In The Cake Bible, she explains the science behind types of leavening, the merits (or not) of sifting, melting chocolate, preheating ovens, and more. There are precise and detailed instructions for intricate wedding cakes as well as cakes that can be mixed and in the oven in five minutes. In addition, nutrition information is included with every recipe. Cake scientist Beranbaum doesn't forget the art, either; pencil drawings teach novice bakers how to create a garden full of flowers from royal icing and mushrooms from piped meringue. It's no wonder that the International Association of Culinary Professionals picked The Cake Bible as their cookbook of the year for 1988--this book has something to teach bakers at every level.

"If you ever bake a cake, this book will become your partner in the kitchen."

-- from the foreword by Maida Heatter

This is the classic cake cookbook that enables anyone to make delicious, exquisite cakes. As a writer for food magazines, women's magazines, and newspapers, including The New York Times, Rose Levy Beranbaum's trademark is her ability to reduce the most complex techniques to easy-to-follow recipes. Rose makes baking a joy. This is the definitive work on cakes by the country's top cake baker.

The Cake Bible shows how to:

Mix a buttery, tender layer cake in under five minutes with perfect results every time

Make the most fabulous chocolate cake you ever imagined with just three ingredients

Find recipes for every major type of cake, from pancakes to four-tiered wedding cakes

Make cakes with less sugar but maximum flavor and texture

Make many low- to no- cholesterol, low-saturated-fat recipes