The Best Baking Cookbooks
With hundreds of TV shows about baking and cooking, plus the explosion of internet sites dedicated to baking, you are now blessed with hundreds of cookbooks focusing on baking. It can be overwhelming but there are some excellent baking cookbooks available for all types of cuisines and diets. The hard part is choosing which cookbooks to follow.
All of us have probably had cookbooks given to us as gifts. Many of us have cookbooks that were our mother’s or our grandmother’s. I have a cookbook that I refer to often that came from my grandmother’s church and it has some fabulous baking recipes. Like the options available to us when choosing clothing, we now have multiple options when choosing cookbooks, especially good cookbooks that concentrate on baking recipes.
You may know the name Maidia Heatter. She is a well known baker and is a hero to chocolate fans all over the world. Her cookbooks for baking are traditionally best sellers on Amazon and are rightfully praised for their well-written recipes that are easy to follow and very informative. I still use one of her chocolate chip recipes that I have had for over 20 years. I love her quote about baking: “Happiness is baking cookies. Happiness is giving them away. And serving them, and eating them, talking about them, reading and writing about them, thinking about them, and sharing them with you.”
You can learn more about this great baking cookbook HERE.
Basic Bread Baking
One of the most intoxicating smells is that of fresh-baked bread. Admit it, you almost always pick up bread at the supermarket, you never bake. That’s true of most of us and it’s a shame. Homemade bread is easy to make, uses very few ingredients and the results can be life altering. Having a sandwich on thick homemade bread is a much different (and better) food experience than having that same sandwich on spongy, preservative-laden grocery store bread. As you progress on your baking journey you need to explore the world of bread baking.
A great place to start is Bread Baking For Beginners. This cookbook has a great variety of recipes with simple, clear directions. It also gives you an education on how bread baking works. You can quickly learn how to work with yeast and why it’s important to your bread. You will find out just how many different types of flour there are and why each type adds a different taste and texture to your bread. This is one of Amazon’s most popular baking cookbooks and it’s a great starting point when learning how to bake bread. You can find out more about this cookbook HERE.
TV Baking Show Cookbooks
There are plenty of opportunities to watch people bake on TV. There are channels dedicated to food and it’s preparation, there are YouTube channels that are exclusively food driven and other options to expand your food horizons (and maybe your waistline). One of the most popular current shows is The Great British Bake Off and one of the celebrity cooks on that show is Mary Berry.
Sometimes called “The Queen Of Cakes”, Mary Berry has quite a few cookbooks under her name. One of her most popular is Mary Berry’s Baking Bible. In this baking cookbook she has created 250 dessert recipes that are easy to follow and beautifully photographed. This is not a picture book however. These recipes are for delicious desserts that you will be proud to serve. Nothing is too complicated or difficult but the results are visually beautiful, as is the taste. While some of her popularity is probably because of her TV show, she is rightfully popular as a very good chef. You can learn more about her cookbooks for baking HERE.
The Baking Bible
This may seem like an arrogant name for a baking cookbook but it is a spectacular book and it probably deserves the title. Granted there are other cookbooks called The Baking Bible (see the review above) but this title seem accurate.
Rose Levy Beranbaum is a legendary baker and the winner of the 2015 IACP Cookbook Award for Baking. Her 2014 cookbook, The Baking Bible, is over 500 pages of recipes of all kinds of baked goods. Whether you want to bake bread, muffins, scones, cakes or cookies, you will be able to find a wonderful assortment of recipes in this book. While some of the recipes may border on difficult, most of simple and clearly explained. The measurements are precise and the instructions are detailed and very accurate. While this cookbook may not be the best for beginners it is great for anyone who has even a small amount of baking experience. I highly recommended this book and you can discover more about it HERE.
