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Home Baking & Dessert Books

The best home baking books offer you good recipes—but even better, they give you ideas for indulging your creativity. Whether you like to bake bread, want to try new flavors in your cakes and cookies, or love homemade ice cream, these books can be your trusty guides.

We're also proud to offer as many books as possible about baking traditions from other countries or from distinctive communities. Baking books like these help preserve memories and traditions from homes around the world.

Home baking books are full of the promise of good times, happy moments, and the satisfaction of a job well done. Our customers expect baking cookbooks to offer them precision, insight, and adventure, and we look for all three qualities when we’re choosing which books to tell you about.

It’s commonly said that while cooking lends itself to improvisation, baking is not so friendly to spur of the moment changes. Proportion matters in home baking books to a much bigger degree than it does in, say a soup cookbook or a salad cookbook. While you can decide that a chili needs a little more heat or the salad dressing could use some fresh tarragon, It’s hard to know from the taste and texture of raw cookie dough if it will spread out too much or cool to be hard as a rock.

Good baking cookbooks will often give you ideas for making changes to a recipe and encourage you to try those changes. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of using a different spice or substituting one flavoring for another.

With practice, you can develop the judgment to make other changes as well, substituting a different type of flour, using less sugar, or changing the cooking time or temperature to adjust the texture of whatever it is you are going to enjoy.

We also like home baking books which recommend you measure by weight, and particularly by metric. Experienced bakers know that if you want a recipe to come out the same way time after time, it really helps if your measurements are duplicated as closely as possible each time. Using a kitchen scale will make every one of your baking cookbooks do a better job for you.

If you’re interested in adapting some of your favorite recipes from volume to weight measurement, some quick rules of thumb are:

  • 1 cup of general-purpose flour weighs 120 grams or 4.25 ounces
  • 1 cup of sugar weighs 200 grams or 8 ounces
  • 1 cup of butter weighs 225 grams or 8 ounces

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