Sweet Enough: A Dessert Cookbook
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A simple, stylish cookbook full of desserts that come together faster than you can eat them—from the author of Dining In and Nothing Fancy.
“Filled with no-fuss recipes perfect for quick and easy baking projects . . . blissfully effortless.”—People
A BEST COOKBOOK OF THE YEAR: San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Vice
Casual, effortless, chic: These are not words you’d use to describe most desserts. But before Alison Roman made recipes so perfect that they go by one name—The Cookie, The Pasta, The Lemon Cake—she was a restaurant pastry chef who spent most of her time learning to make things the hard way. She studied flavor, technique, and precision, then distilled her knowledge to pare it all down to create dessert recipes that feel special and approachable, impressive and doable. In Sweet Enough, Alison has written the book for people who think they don’t have the time or skill to pull off dessert. Here, the desserts you want to make right away, you can make right away.
Alison shows you how to make simple yet sublime sweets with her trademark casualness, like how to make jam in the oven, then turn that jam into a dessert—swirled into ice cream or folded into easy one-bowl cake batter. (Opening a jar of jam is more than fine, too.) She waxes poetic on the virtues of frozen fruit and teaches you the best way to throw your own Sundae Party. There are effortless cakes that take just minutes to get into a pan. And there are new, instant classics with a signature Alison twist, like Salted Lemon Pie, Raspberries and Sour Cream, Toasted Rice Pudding, or a Caramelized Maple Tart. Requiring little more than your own two hands and a few mixing bowls, the recipes are geared towards those without fancy equipment or specialty ingredients.
Whether you’re a dedicated baker or, better yet, someone who doesn’t think they are a baker, Sweet Enough lets you finish any dinner, any party, or any car ride to a dinner party with a little something wonderful and sweet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Roman (Nothing Fancy) exhibits her signature style in her brassy if unfocused latest, which aims to prove that "desserts, baking, whatever we want to call it here... should be for anyone, at any time, requiring little more than two hands and a modicum of patience." Often rejecting standardized recipes in favor of meandering essays, Roman brazenly declares meringue no good and provides a list of baking loves/hates with the subtlety of a middle schooler's slam book. Recipes for tried-and-true items such as pineapple upside down cake and banana bread are hardly novelties, but Roman's quirky voice is the real draw. Ginger cake, for example, has "a pleasant mustiness, like finding yourself alone in the back halls of a museum," while a chapter titled "I've Got All This Fruit, Now What?" suggests sugaring raspberries and swirling them with sour cream. There are some baffling choices, however: Roman includes Nora Ephron's bread pudding from Heartburn, then notes that she found the results merely passable. Confusingly, given the title, the book includes a chapter on savory items, such as a mushroom pot pie with buttery double crust. It's not purely a baking book, either, with instructions for making frozen yogurt and coffee granita. The haphazardness of it all makes this feel like it's more about Roman than the recipes.
