In honor National Cupcake Week, here is a fabulous post from this past July by the fabulous Alexandra Roumbas Goldstein about the best cupcake books on the market. Enjoy!
I’m a big fan of baking, finding it a relaxing past time that has the brilliant side-effect of pleasing your family and friends by giving them drastic sugar highs. Hell, I even manage to induce euphoria with sugar-free creations for the diabetics. But I’m no genius – I’ve just learned to follow instructions.
Once you’ve gathered together a formidably full baking drawer, you’ll want to do something with it. Here are my top five books for dipping into and turning you delicious treats for yourself or anyone you love.
1. The Professional Pastry Chef: Fundamentals of Baking and Pastry – Bo Friberg
Once you’re over the fact that Bo Friberg is, in fact, the Swedish Chef, you’ll realise this extraordinary tome contains everything you could ever want to know to get you started on the road to baking bliss. Friberg pitches his recipes for the amateur as well as those training to be professionals, and offers variations for large and small batches and the different ways that ingredients are stored at home and in a professional kitchen. Thanks to this amazing book, I hit the ground running and went from never making any bread at all to creating a surprisingly tasty plaited star-shaped loaf. I’m clumsy, slapdash and a bit impatient, so if I can do it, you can too.
2. Cupcake Heaven – Susannah Blake
Blake’s recipes are almost laughably simple, and once you’ve managed the basic cupcake sponge then you make minor adaptations for different flavours. Where Blake’s slim book excels is in offering a helpful section on cupcakes for special diets. My favourite of these are some deliciously moist, fudgy vegan chocolate cupcakes, so rich you’d never know there’s no butter, eggs or cream in the sponge or smooth, shiny, slightly coffee-scented icing. There are lots of great decoration ideas too.
3. How to be a Domestic Goddess – Nigella Lawson
Love her – and I do – or loathe her, you can’t help admiring this very best of Nigella’s books. Few of the recipes are complicated, and the Damp Lemon and Almond Cake and Chocolate Loaf Cake are among the best, richest, moistest and most delicious I’ve ever sampled. The Rosebud Madeleines are ridiculously easy and, as long as you like rosewater, bewitchingly moreish.
4. Cherry Cake and Ginger Beer – Jane Brocket
It’s the concept of this book as much as its recipes that make it such excellent reading. I’ve twice bought it as a gift for friends because it’s fun just to read, never mind use as a baking guide. The concept is, as you might guess from the title, pulling together recipes that might be found in children’s books, and the layout and illustrations reflect the roots of the foodstuffs brilliantly.
5. Bake – Rachel Allen
Bake includes some of the softly-voiced TV cook’s most handy home recipes, including a necessarily longwinded – though not complex – recipe for soft, chewy pretzels. The oatmeal and vanilla shortbread cookies are gorgeous, and restraint is not the order of the day here. Packed with classic desserts like sticky toffee pudding, you’re looking to get through a dairy farm’s worth of butter before you get from the front page to the back.
Of course these are just five amongst many great books. I’ve not touched on Her Majesty, Delia Smith, nor the new Mary Berry Baking Bible I’m itching to get my hands on. But with these five books (and, I admit it, The Leith’s Cookery Bible), I’ve turned out some great munchies that impressed despite minimal effort and concentration.
If I do inspire you to get baking, do send us a sample, won’t you?