Carla Bakes: Sweet, Savory, and from the Heart

Carla Hall has been collecting baking knowledge for years, as a professional cook, teacher, competition judge, and enthusiastic student of other bakers. Carla Bakes puts that accumulated advice into more than 80 sweet and savory recipes, written with the detail she believes newer bakers need to understand not just the steps, but what they should be looking for along the way. 

The recipes are an exuberant mix of Hall’s Southern roots, travels, nostalgia, and curiosity. Sorghum flour drop biscuits and sweet grits brûlée sit alongside Turkish salep, Southern pecan crinkle baklava, a ham and cheese Paris-Brest, butternut squash beignets, and a giant strawberry-thyme Pop Tart inspired by her disappointment that the childhood original no longer tasted as she remembered it.

Hall encourages experimentation, but supplies plenty of practical guidance first, from freezing shaped scones to bake later to keeping flour in place on a work surface with a light coating of cooking spray. Throughout the book she credits the bakers, teachers, places, and experiences behind the recipes, making the book as much about passing along accumulated kitchen knowledge as mastering a particular set of baked goods. 

There’s playfulness throughout including Hall’s own paper artwork and photographs made in her home. The result feels appropriately personal for a baker who describes baking as both her first culinary passion and one of her favorite forms of creative expression.