Customer Reviews

The Best Quick Breads: 150 Recipes for Muffins, Scones, Shortcakes, Gingerbreads, Cornbreads, Coffeecakes, and More

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a great baking book! Wonderful waffle recipes, the Hungarian Sour Cream Coffee Cake is great (my sister ate 1/2 in one sitting!), my husband loved the Fresh Apple Coffee Cake. I can't wait to try the lemon-poppyseed-saffron bread! I always test-cook from the library's copy before I buy. This is a cookbook worth buying for my collection. I also like the troubleshooting section in the beginning of the book.

This a decent, but not outstanding collection of quick bread recipes. Having a complete assembly of recipes in one book is a great convenience. Normally, I have to flip through a number of cookbooks to get the quick bread I want, since each one has only a few such recipes. The recipes themselves, however, are pretty standard, and you probably already many similar recipes in the baking books you have on your bookshelf. I do recommend this one, but only because of the convenience of having all the quick bread recipes in one place. The main advantage is that when you are looking for a very good quick bread recipe, you only have to search through this book, rather than having a pile of a dozen or so baking books on your desk.

All of the recipes in the cornbread chapter have flour, rather than the genuine article that does not have flour. The muffin chapter was pretty pitiful, as was the coffee cakes. The pancake chapter would be more useful if the author described the character of the particular pancake (light and fluffy, thick and rich, thin and rubbery-in the good sense, spidery and lacy, etc.) rather than regale you with anecdotal stories. There are several rare and valuable crepe recipes, but the recipes for the fillings are below average. A significant minority of the recipes seems to be nothing more than manuscript padding; I am not convinced that the author actually tested all of the recipes (viz: the ones that add cooked rice, since they were either gritty or lumpy; the recipes for microwave fruit jam were laughable, not to mention dangerous). Most of the waffle recipes are the wierd ones requiring egg whites beaten to soft peaks. The author has also picked up the bad habit of adding whole grains and/or dried fruit to just about everything for a healthy and nutritious treat (derived from either "Recipe/Diet for a Small Planet", the worst cookbooks ever, or else British baking books).

The last chapter is a reasonably useful compendium of ingredients, techniques, and equipment. Some sort of table of contents of this chapter would have been useful. The sections on eggs, salt, sugar and oil are predominantly wrong. Several recipes call for beaten egg whites, but detailed instructions for doing so are not forthcoming.

It has chapters on: loaf breads, gingerbreads, cornbreads, coffee cakes, muffins, pancakes, crepes, waffles, popovers, dumplings, scones, and biscuits.

I have been a professional research and production baker. This book gave me information I did not already know. I wish I were fifteen again so that I would have time to make every formula in this book, and enjoy the hard work of a great author for all those missed years.

I am the same as Kelly. I borrow the book from the library and try a couple recipes to make sure it tastes good and then buy the book. This book offers alternatives to the recipes which I like. Sometimes you don't want to make the same thing over and over again although you like it the first time and the alternatives add a different twist. The cranberry scone was absolutely DELICIOUS!!!!

This is definitely the ultimate book for baking all sorts of bread meals. Corn bread, scones, gingerbread, pretty much ANYTHING you want to know about cooking bread can be found in this very convenient book. The book does a nice job of showing you how easy it is to cook anything related to bread. It's also a pretty good learning experience, personally.

I love this book because our family is a "Sunday Brunch" crowd. We make a brunch each and every Sunday and have a great time. Of course there is always a sweet bread/coffee cake and most of the time it comes from this book or the author's other book: Breakfast Breads - which I also highly recommend.

Who wouldn't want to wake up to the smell of homemade bread (even if it's quick bread) and fresh coffee?

I hope you enjoy it as much we do!

This book is informative and helpful. Its one of those books you pass around at a home gathering and all oogle over the great sounding recipes. This book was a Christmas Present and yet have to make anything from it. However the book is easily read and understood. This is for a man and we know what they are like in the kitchen
I find this book to be a great buy !!