The Baking Bible

Review By SpizeVilla:

• This is an excellent all-around cookbook for aspiring and expert bakers alike. For years, pie crust has been my nightmare, but Rose has perfected the method, and as a result, I have as well. Beautiful images adorn the pages, and the recipes are well-organized with cup, grams, and ounce quantities, making it much easier for both UK and US chefs. You can get her pie crust recipe online, but it’s one of my favourites from my vast collection of cookbooks.
• With two other ‘Bible’ cookbooks under my belt, I was taken aback when I opened this one and discovered the entire book was printed in colour, with some stunning imagery accompanying all of the recipes. I realise this may come out as a little cheesy, but as I go through Rose’s works, I’m already fighting the want to bake everything. And seeing beautiful, glossy photographs of each cookie, cake, and that awful pizza rustica isn’t helping my obsession.
• However, this is a fantastic book. It includes a handful of recipes from her previous books as well as what I assume are some new ones. The instructions are clear and concise, with explanations for why certain steps are taken, and I have yet to make a dish from it that was not delicious. You literally cannot go wrong with this book as a general baking book.
• This book is quite large at 560 pages, but it contains hundreds of useful recipes as well as suggestions and guidance on equipment, ingredients, procedures, and troubleshooting.
  If you want regular outcomes, you’ll need to learn about ingredients and baking processes. The Baking Bible, as well as her other books, are essential.
• The recipes in this book are faultless, and Rose ensures it by adding weight and volume figures. The majority of these recipes are projects, the kind of enjoyable, all-day activities to which you would commit a Saturday. This is not a book for quick and easy meals, and usually every main recipe has many sub-recipes (the cake layers, the jam filling, the ganache, the buttercream the ganache is whipped into, the decoration, etc). The finished outcome, on the other hand, is awe-inspiring. I made her a babka with an almond-cream cheese and apricot jam filling, and I think I said “Oh my goodness” in between bites. Also delicious is the apple and sour cream coffee cake.The photographs are stunning.
• I bought this book because my husband bought me a kitchen aid mixer for Valentine’s Day (so sweet!) and I was (and still am) adamant that it would not end sitting on my counter, like our deep fryer or our really expensive juicer, unused. So, ever since I bought this cookbook, I’ve made something from it every Sunday, starting from page one and working our way through it recipe by recipe. This past Sunday, we had the lemon curd cream cheese cake, which was incredible, and the blueberry buckle cake, holy shot, I thought I’d died and gone to cake heaven. Even a novice can follow the directions because they are highly detailed and easy to understand.
• This book is so thorough that it can be overpowering at times. You’ll know every tip and trick for every step of the journey because it’s so detailed. Before you begin, I recommend reading the entire recipe. I started the brioche recipe only to discover that it would need to rise and be refrigerated for two days! However, once they were finished, they were incredible! The book made it simple to make them flawless, even for a first-timer!
• I’m very glad I bought this book! I’m going to take advantage of every second I have it in my hands. When I’m cooking, I’ll need to find a book stand that will protect the pages! I’m looking forward to getting home this evening.
• It’s a fantastic book, but consider the fact that it contains a lot of international recipes, the most of which are not well-known in India.