Everyone Can Bake
Simple Recipes to Master and Mix
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Named one of the best cookbooks of the season by The New York Times, Chowhound, Eater, Food & Wine, Forbes, and more.
Acclaimed pastry chef Dominique Ansel shares his simple, foolproof recipes for tarts, cakes, jams, buttercreams, and more “building blocks” of desserts for home cooks to master and mix as they please.
Dominique Ansel is the creator of beautiful, innovative, and delicious desserts, from the Frozen S’More to the Cronut®, the croissant-doughnut hybrid that took the world by storm. He has been called the world’s best pastry chef. But this wasn’t always the case.
Raised in a large, working-class family in rural France, Ansel could not afford college and instead began work as a baker’s apprentice at age sixteen. There, he learned the basics—how to make tender chocolate cakes, silky custards, buttery shortbread, and more.
Ansel shares these essential, go-to recipes for the first time. With easy-to-follow instructions and kitchen tips, home cooks can master the building-blocks of desserts. These crucial components can be mixed in a variety of ways, and Ansel will show you how: his vanilla tart shell can be rolled out and stamped into cookies; shaped and filled with lemon curd; or even crumbled into a topping for ice cream.
This cookbook will inspire beginners and experienced home cooks alike to bake as imaginatively as Ansel himself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ansel (Dominique Ansel: The Secret Recipes) famous for his invention of the Cronut primes bakers' creativity in this posh guide to sophisticated cakes and tarts. Chapters are divided into bases, fillings (a dessert's "personality"), and embellishments. For each there is a classic recipe and then riffs: ladyfingers may be flavored with citrus or soaked in syrup, for example. The final section contains instructions for assembling complete desserts, with tips such as piping curd into a tart crust rather than spreading with a spatula to avoid dirtying the rim. Recipes are professional (with both metric weight and volume measurements) and precise, and, indeed, these are largely ambitious projects, requiring equipment such as metal rings and acetate. A brief chart suggests possible building combinations (for example, an olive oil mousse can rest on an almond-molasses base and be topped with figs and vanilla whipped cream), but true beginners will have a steep hill to climb. Ansel's own imagination is a delight: in a brownie base variation, melted butter is infused with rosemary and Ansel suggests dousing the brownie slab in soft caramel. Mini-essays on Ansel's education (in kindergarten he drilled himself on the alphabet song) serve as reminders that practice makes perfect. Pastry-chef-wannabes will thrill to this challenge.
