Baking: From My Home to Yours | 
| Author: Dorie Greenspan
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Category: Book
List Price: $40.00
Buy New: $7.91
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Avg. Customer Rating:  79 reviews
Sales Rank: 253511
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 528
Shipping Weight (lbs): 4.8
Dimensions (in): 11 x 8.5 x 1.5
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.815
ASIN: B0017HZRB2
Publication Date: September 25, 2006
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
In Baking with Julia (Child, of course) and Desserts by Pierre Herme, 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 Devils 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
Product Description
Dorie Greenspan has written recipes for the most eminent chefs in
the world: Pierre Herme, 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 Herme'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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 74 more reviews...
 Great as Gift for New Bakers! October 6, 2008
This is a fabulous book with wonderful recipes. I have made many of them with unusual (for me!) success! It is the perfect new bride, new apartment, or engagement gift. I would wholeheartedly recommend it.
 Disappointing. October 1, 2008
I've made three things from this book so far, and it's highly unlikely I'll be making any more.
The Chocolate Ganache Ice Cream was excellent, but the instructions were not. It's amazing that Dorie left out the most crucial step in making any kind of custard. She failed to note that the custard needs to be strained before adding to the melted chocolate. Now since I've made custards and custard-based ice creams before, I was fully aware of the necessity of that step, but I'm sure there are lots of other people who are not. If they're not aware of the necessity to strain out the custard, they will be left with little pieces of scrambled eggs in their ice cream. Real appetizing.
The Cinnamon Squares were very good, but too cinnamony, even for me, and I'm a cinnamon lover. That wasn't really a problem, however, since I could always cut it down the next time around. But... something very strange happened after I froze the leftover pieces. When I defrosted them, they were absolutely gooey, sticky, and inedible. Needless to say, they went into the garbage. Now, that has NEVER happened before with any other cake recipe at any time in all the years I've been baking (this is actually a regular cake, not a typical bar or square, even though the title says "squares"). So, why didn't Dorie simply indicate that these don't freeze well? Another real irritation.
And lastly, the Espresso Chocolate Shortbread Cookies were very good, but nothing outstanding, and probably not something I'd make again. As usual, the instructions were terrible.
Overall, this book is a real disappointment. The best part is the beautiful photography.
excellent cookbook for beginners September 2, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
baking from my home to yours is great. i've used a couple of recipes from it already and so far all's good. one gripe that i might have is that im in singapore and certain ingredients are not easily available (like buttermilk) but i can't blame it on anyone! overall an excellent buy.
 Disappointing results, way too sweet August 16, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
I had high hopes because I've loved so many of the other books that Dorie has worked on, especially the Pierre Herme books and Baking with Julia. I had expectations that her book would be full of chic but accessible version of "home" baking.
My first complaint is that there are very few compelling recipes here. The cake chapter, for instance, just isn't that inspiring. Likewise with the cookie chapter. There are many good-looking recipes recipes, but very few that would send me into the kitchen.
My second complaint is that the recipes I've tried have been a bit lackluster and/or exceedingly sweet. I tried the most classic brownie recipe and did not like it at all, the texture was almost sandy, hard to explain. Pierre Herme's brownie recipe blows it out of the water, and it's really not anything complicated.
I also tried the perfect party cake and the black and white cake from the cover. Again, both were way too sweet and little else.
The other day I tried a batch of the dulce de leche cookies, which I hoped to bring to work. The cookies, plain, tasted okay but not so special--they need something, maybe some cinnamon, I don't know. Once they were filled and sandwiched, they went overboard with jaw-clenching sweetness. The next day they were mush, and 3 days later they are still sitting on the kitchen table, waiting until I can allow myself to throw them out.
The World Peace cookies didn't impress me much either, and I much prefer the chocolate sables from the Herme book. Like the black and white cake, it suffers from the chocolate chip bits.
I was really surprised to notice this trend with her book, and I still haven't given up on it. But I have to admit that, were it not for the esteem I have for Greenspan, I would have quit this book a while back. It seems like she was aiming for as large a book as she could put together, and it shows in some of the uninspiring recipes. I would have much preferred a book half the size with a more discriminating choice of recipes.
So far, so good July 14, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
So far I've only made a couple of recipes from this book (shortbread cookies, cheesecake, brown sugar blueberry cake, brioche, and pecan honey sticky buns). Cheesecake and brioche are two of my favorite things to make (and consume) and the cheesecake and brioche I made using Dorie Greenspan's recipe were the best I've ever had. The shortbread cookie dough was simple to make. I used it as the base for my cheesecake and got rave reviews. The pecan honey sticky buns and brown sugar blueberry cake were made for a bake sale and sold out. One lady bought a bun in the morning and came back a couple of hours later for a second. The brioche is hard work but so worth it. I think next time I'll make a big batch and freeze it. Besides the recipes, I like that Dorie Greenspan includes a section on how to make slight variations. I will definitely be trying more of the recipes from this book.
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