With cookbooks, those on the savory side have a lot more leeway to showcase innovative ideas and far-flung dishes. Armchair chefs are just as happy to read about smoking eels over green hay and butchering small game as they are to find a recipe for the best macaroni and cheese.
Dessert books tend to play it safer, delving deeper into the sweetly familiar rather than exploring the wilderness beyond. The best ones have a clear authorial voice and point of view, revealing delicious new truths about those old favorites.
So it goes with this year’s crop of baking books, the strongest of which are subdued on the surface, quietly thrilling once you crack the spine. What they lack in flashy spun-sugar theatrics they make up for with gentler, more sustaining joys. You won’t find gilded ooh-and-ahh-inducing spectacles, but the kind of excellent game-changing brownie recipes that you’ll make for every party, potluck and picnic in years to come.
I found exactly that in “The Violet Bakery Cookbook” (Ten Speed Press, $29.99), by Claire Ptak. Her brownies, made with rye flour instead of bland all-purpose, have an earthy nuttiness that deepens the bittersweet chocolate and cocoa powder in the batter. They bake up gooey in the center and very rich, with a dusting of crunchy sea-salt flakes that conveys sophistication without detracting from the childlike pleasures of the fudgy core.
Ptak, a pastry chef who once worked at Chez Panisse, applies a modern, seasonal and decidedly Californian sensibility to the proper British baked goods in her London bakery. Her light and flaky scones are freshened up with spelt flour, fresh ginger and crème fraîche. Her tea cakes boast coffee, cardamom and apricot kernels. Her cookies contain buckwheat flour; her strawberry jam has lemon verbena.
They are just the kind of intriguing yet unfussy sweets I can see making all year long as the different ingredients come in and out of season.
Also hailing from London, Edd Kimber is a home baker and blogger who won the first season of “The Great British Bake Off,” a popular reality television show. In his third cookbook, “Patisserie Made Simple” (Kyle Books, $24.95), he takes on French pastries.
There have been countless tomes on the art of French patisserie by sources more classically trained than Kimber. But his distance from the canon may be an asset here. Instead of toeing the line on technique, he respectfully streamlines recipes, simplifying in the name of ease while preserving the essence of any dessert.
His gâteau Breton, a moist shortbreadlike torte with a layer of prune at its core, was saved from any potential prune-y stodginess by the astonishing buttery richness of the dough. In addition to the classic prune and rum filling, Kimber encourages you to go your own way with the likes of chocolate or caramel. I tried dried apricots and brandy, and it was pleasingly bright and fruity. It’s likely that figs and port would work, too, turning the tart into something akin to a giant buttery Fig Newton.
Although Kimber’s pastries are the kinds of classics you’d see in patisseries all over France (think lemon tarts, éclairs, almond croissants), the book manages to present them in ways that breathe new life into the old standbys.
Much of this is due to the excellent food photography by Laura Edwards. How many images of madeleines have you seen? These are different, splattered with a messy, sticky-looking lemon glaze that all but makes you want to run your finger over the page to swipe up the drips. And I was positively giddy when, after making the fragrant plump cakes myself, I got to do just that.
On the other end of the French authenticity spectrum is the pastry chef François Payard, who makes very few concessions to Americans in either his namesake bakery or his latest cookbook, “Payard Cookies” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30, with Anne McBride). But being dashingly, strictly Gallic is part of the appeal.
In addition to the requisite macarons, financiers and sables, most of the cookies in his book are of the modest, unassuming variety you’d find on trays in any neighborhood patisserie in Paris, vying for your attention against raspberry tarts and opulent opera cakes.
But these chic, perfectly golden morsels are precisely what you’d want with a bracing demitasse on a chilly afternoon. And his exacting instructions will get you near-professional results that, while time consuming, are completely worth the extra focus.
The majority of recipes come from Payard’s father, who owned a bakery in the South of France. Many of the cookies unapologetically require a pastry bag for piping without giving other less fussy options. The upside is that piped cookies are exceedingly elegant and, once you have the hang of them, actually pretty fast to form.
But I didn’t want to get the pastry bag out from behind the spaetzle maker and the panini press. So instead of piping the gorgeous cardamom-scented dough to make Viennois, I rolled ropes of dough into crescents in my hands. Imperfections hidden beneath a dusting of powdered sugar, the results were melt-in the-mouth memorable.
I soon left France for the chillier climes of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, by way of Trine Hahnemann’s “Scandinavian Baking” (Quadrille, $35). Although these days Scandinavian cuisine is known more for modernist sous-vide reindeer than for traditional yeast-risen coffee cakes, you’ll find nothing remotely avant-garde in this book, which exudes the coziness of a snow-covered cabin in the woods.
Hahnemann, a chef, caterer and cookbook author in Denmark, offers recipes for marzipan-covered cakes, flaky pastries filled with cream and other treats that seem as if they’ve been passed down from someone’s white-haired Nordic grandmother. They are old-fashioned yet enduringly appealing, rich with vanilla, almonds and lingonberry jam.
I followed the very simple instructions for homemade marzipan, which yielded an intense, not-too-sweet paste that could be easily rolled into a disk to top a cake, or pinched into roses to adorn one. It’s in my freezer for future festivities.
I also baked a lovely chocolate coconut cake that the author routinely makes for her daughter’s birthday — a relatively light, elegant torte-like round with a fine feathery crumb and a slather of rich, fudgy frosting topped with shredded coconut. It’s just the thing to serve after a heavy holiday meal when only chocolate will do.
Closer to home, you can’t get more ebulliently American than Mindy Segal’s “Cookie Love” (Ten Speed Press, $24.99, with Kate Leahy). Although the cookies in the book will look familiar, they are all contemporary and irreverent takes on the kind of homey treats Mrs. Cleaver would have waiting for Beaver after school.
In the richly illustrated pages, Segal, a pastry chef and the owner of the HotChocolate restaurant in Chicago, reinvents everything from snickerdoodles to chocolate chippers to brownie crinkles, sharpening the flavors, enriching the textures and refining the techniques.
In her rugelach, she adds sea-salt flakes and kosher salt to the dough to accentuate and round out the cream cheese. Then she goes rogue with the fillings, stuffing them with everything from cinnamon brickle to figs to cocoa nibs. I baked a raspberry rose variation, which, with the salty hit of the dough, the luscious fruity filling and the floral sugary topping, redefined the whole rugelach genre for me. I doubt I’ll go back to my old recipe ever again.
And the crowd-sourced and crowd-tested recipes on Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs’s website, Food52, are rock solid and meant for home cooks with varying levels of skill.
Their latest cookbook, “Food52 Baking” (Ten Speed Press, $29.99), showcases recipes from the site that give you the biggest bang for the least effort — those that you can whip up, as they write, “on a weeknight, once the dinner dishes are cleared away and the kids are asleep — without having to stay up so late that you’re bleary-eyed the next day.”
It’s an admirable mission for a baking book, one that makes it seem like a perfectly fine idea to start cracking the eggs for the excellent syrupy coconut tres leches cake at 9 p.m. I didn’t actually taste that cake until the next morning (it had to cool). But aside from the waiting time, throwing it together was, as promised in the book’s subtitle, “a snap.”
So was the Easy-as-Pie Apple Cake. I found the recipe title to be deceiving; cakes are generally easier than pies. But the sentiment hit home, and this truly is one of the simplest of apple cakes: slightly spiced, with a tender crumb filled with small chunks of juicy apple and bits of pecan.
It’s going into my fall baking roster, along with my old standby recipes of my husband’s favorite brown butter pumpkin bread and the rosemary shortbread my daughter adores — other familiar and cherished sweets taken to new heights.
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