The Healthy Oven Baking Book: Delicious reduced-fat deserts with old-fashioned flavor [Hardcover]

Sarah Phillips (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 19, 1999

Here is an abundance of recipes for everyone's favorite baked goods, made with completely natural ingredients and a minimum of fat.

Fast, easy, healthful, and delicious--that's the winning combination Sarah Phillips delivers in The Healthy Oven Baking Book, featuring more than 125 recipes for reduced-fat muffins, coffee cakes, pancakes, scones, pies, layer cakes, cheesecakes, cookies, and many other old-fashioned favorites.

Fans of Sarah Phillips's Healthy Oven brand of all-natural, low-fat cake and muffin mixes, sold in supermarkets throughout the country, have been clamoring for recipes to bake from scratch at home--and that's exactly what she provides in The Healthy Oven Baking Book, along with specific instructions for new ways of measuring, mixing, and baking that will ensure perfect results every time.

It's not hard to take the fat out of baking, but doing it without using artificial substitutes, and creating reduced-fat baked goods that taste like Mother used to make, requires a lot of experimenting and testing. Sarah Phillips has done all the work--using applesauce and other low-fat baking secrets--so that home cooks everywhere can produce healthful baked desserts that will satisfy everyone from picky children to discerning adult gourmands.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Sarah Phillips was a single mother who pulled herself up by her apron strings by selling cookies baked at home. Then, she turned to making low-fat muffins, which became so popular she translated her recipes into mixes to be sold in supermarkets.

In her Healthy Oven Baking Book, Phillips is realistic. She explains why fat-free recipes give poor results: taking out too much fat also removes good taste and texture. So, she often uses applesauce in place of fat, but she also uses canola oil, whole eggs, or a small amount of butter in some recipes. Butter, she explains, makes pie dough tender and keeps baked goods moist. Healthy Oven Baking Book offers two new techniques for low-fat baking. Both rely on getting air into delicate batters, and help you avoid overmixing, which makes cakes tough. The techniques, the "New Classic Method" and the "New Creaming Method," call for beating batters for at least 1 1/2 minutes with a handheld electric mixer, and for handling batters very gently.

Using Phillips's 125-plus recipes, and following her advice on ingredients, you can bake everything from sticky Cinnamon Swirl Coffee Cake topped with Grape Nuts Cereal instead of nuts, to Zucchini Bread, a killer Fudge Layer Cake with fudgy frosting, and phyllo-layered baklava made with pears. She also features eight recipes incorporating her instant mixes. Cheesecake lovers should take special note--The Healthy Oven Baking Book offers amazing recipes that set a new standard for creaminess. They're low in fat but excellent compared to any other cheesecake. --Dana Jacobi

From the Inside Flap

Here is an abundance of recipes for everyone's favorite baked goods, made with completely natural ingredients and a minimum of fat.

Fast, easy, healthful, and delicious--that's the winning combination Sarah Phillips delivers in The Healthy Oven Baking Book, featuring more than 125 recipes for reduced-fat muffins, coffee cakes, pancakes, scones, pies, layer cakes, cheesecakes, cookies, and many other old-fashioned favorites.

Fans of Sarah Phillips's Healthy Oven brand of all-natural, low-fat cake and muffin mixes, sold in supermarkets throughout the country, have been clamoring for recipes to bake from scratch at home--and that's exactly what she provides in The Healthy Oven Baking Book, along with specific instructions for new ways of measuring, mixing, and baking that will ensure perfect results every time.

It's not hard to take the fat out of baking, but doing it without using artificial substitutes, and creating reduced-fat baked goods that taste like Mother used to make, requires a lot of experimenting and testing. Sarah Phillips has done all the work--using applesauce and other low-fat baking secrets--so that home cooks everywhere can produce healthful baked desserts that will satisfy everyone from picky children to discerning adult gourmands.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Broadway; 1 edition (January 19, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385492812
• ISBN-13: 978-0385492812
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,201,995 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars High-impact flavor, low-fat recipes--No weird ingredients!, March 24, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Healthy Oven Baking Book: Delicious reduced-fat deserts with old-fashioned flavor (Hardcover)

Sarah Phillips cuts through much of the hype over low-fat baking to offer up an easy-to-use cookbook that allows those with middle-American palates to enjoy healthy eating. While most low-fat books sacrifice flavor for lower-fat counts, use hard-to-find ingredients, or bizarre techniques that leave many cooks stumped, Sarah explains her techniques for light cakes, decadent chocolate cheesecakes and impossibly low-fat cookies clearly. And best of all, she uses ingredients anyone can find at the local supermarket!

Healthy eating isn't just a choice, but a necessity for anyone facing weight or health-related challenges. Her book's clear dietary information makes selecting the appropriate recipe easy.

Joyous baking!

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sarah takes the guess work out of low fat baking!, March 12, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Healthy Oven Baking Book: Delicious reduced-fat deserts with old-fashioned flavor (Hardcover)

Dear Sarah:

What I like about your book is that it has all the information that I have been stumbling to discover on my own by experimenting. I am always transforming recipes into lower fat recipes and I also have the added challenge of substituting honey, maple syrup, etc. for refined sugar. My baking is limited to quickbreads and muffins so those are my favorite recipe parts of the book, however I'm sure once I have time to get to the desserts, it will become another favorite. They look absolutely fabulous!

"Healthy Oven Basics" is another part of the book that's very valuable to me. It's really a blessing. It's just saved me an incredible amount of time and money in trial and error experimenting. I was just starting to get some of these ideas down on my own, but you have really got them down to a science.

I also like the way that the "dry" ingredients are separated from the "wet" in the ingredients list. The color of the print is great, the font is very readable and I love the nutritional analysis of each recipe. The drawings are also nicely distributed. Thank you for a very valuable addition to my library.

Sincerely,

Seppo Ed Farrey

20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars On the right track, but not completely there yet., March 20, 2002

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Healthy Oven Baking Book: Delicious reduced-fat deserts with old-fashioned flavor (Hardcover)

Sarah Phillips has a lot of great ideas. However, this cookbook doesn't deserve a 5-star rating because:

(1) some of her recipes have more sugar than most.

(2) she included recipes that call for Healthy Oven Baking Mix, which I don't have & don't wish to purchase. Maybe I'm splitting hairs here, but I purchased the book thinking that all the recipes would be completely from scratch.