Baking by Flavor

Chocolate, caramel, vanilla, and lemon--ingredients like these define baking flavor. Placing such flavor-makers at the forefront of her approach, Lisa Yockelson's Baking by Flavor presents a luscious array of desserts while revealing techniques for highlighting and intensifying their taste. How does it work? Double Chocolate Madeleines, for example, get their punch not only from cocoa, melted chocolate, and chocolate chips but from a final cocoa-sugar dusting. Yockelson's flavor-centric approach also leads her to discoveries that can liberate recipe-bound bakers. Add ground spices to the dry ingredients when preparing a sweet yeast dough, for example, and you get a subtly delicious flavor boost. Bakers at all levels of proficiency should enjoy Yockelson's insights and put them to good use.

Beginning with a section on flavor-baking strategies--a chart shows readers that cinnamon's flavor is, for example, intensified when combined with butter, rum, or caramel--the book then provides useful "component" recipes for the likes of lemon-scented granulated sugar. The 250 recipes, arranged by flavor, offer a wide range of sweets, from Cinnamon Apple Rolls and Butter Spritz Cookies to Spiced Banana Breakfast Loaf and Sour Cream Ginger Keeping Cake. The recipes also include useful sidebars (lightly press rather than compress the dough for some cookies, is one), plus tips, variations and still more flavor-intensifying suggestions. Illustrated with photos, and containing detailed storage information, the book should become a true, better-baking resource. --Arthur Boehm