Sweet Miniatures: The Art of Making Bite-Size Desserts [Paperback]

Flo Braker (Author), Michael Lamotte (Photographer)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 2000

Award-winning author and acclaimed baking expert Flo Braker knows the best things come in small packages. Now this acclaimed author is back with a revised and expanded edition of her beloved Sweet Miniatures. Winner of the IACP Single-Subject Cookbook Award, Sweet Miniatures offers rich, all-new color photography, a whimsically appealing design, and step-by-step instructions for making all kinds of delectable desserts scaled down to an irresistible one-bite size. Miniature chewy Panforte di Siena, crispy Florentine Squares, and tangy Shreveshire Tarts will whisk family and friends away on an exciting mouthwatering journey. Little sweet somethingsCandied Almond Clusters, Golden Caramels, and Toffee Butter Crunchmake a thoughtful gift during the holidays. From cheerful Chocolate Hedgehogs to a set of Midas Cups for adding that golden touch to a festive soiree, Sweet Miniatures has all the right ingredients for creating the perfect bite-size morsel to suit any occasion.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Sweet Miniatures Flo Braker proves that it is a small world after all. But don't think of this IACP Award-winning cookbook as tiny. Rather, it's a comprehensive introduction to creating fabulous and impressive miniature desserts. Braker, a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle and author of the much-loved Simple Art of Perfect Baking, offers step-by-step recipe directions, a complete list of baking needs, and helpful recommendations based on her own bakery and catering experience. Careful consideration is given to the basic art and science of baking, including sage advice on how to stock a kitchen with the necessary tools and ingredients. Novice and advanced bakers alike will find educational tips such as how to temper chocolate, how to use a pastry bag with tips and a coronet, and how to make simple yet elegant decorations. Braker's focus here, however, is the miniature presentation, and she brings together more than 125 recipes of sought-after minicakes, pastries, cookies, candies, and tarts. Popular favorites include Individual Lemon Meringue Tarts as well as traditional European favorites such as Shortbread Cameos, Viennese Triangles, Krumkake, Pistachio Petit Fours, Neapolitan Wedges, and the holiday favorite, Lebkuchen. Full-color illustrations complement the recipes. Braker even suggests storage ideas to protect the most fragile pastries and to maintain their even more delicate flavor. With such an inclusive, smart, and instructional book Flo Braker lends credibility to the phrase "bite-size." And it's a mouthful. --Teresa Simanton

From Publishers Weekly

You've seen them at tea parties and fancy bakeries--tiny cakes, cookies, and pastries that offer a tantalizing choice of colors, tastes and textures. Braker ( The Simple Art of Perfect Baking ) launched her cooking career creating these tidbits, and her enthusiasm for them is infectious. She makes an artful craft sound easy, and points out that providing family or guests with several such dessert selections is bound to surpass the unveiling of a single kind of cake or pie. Her directions are invaluable and explicit; her many time-saving or do-ahead steps will maximize time spent in the kitchen. The recipes are precise, but also allow for experimentation. Experience with handling pastry dough or chocolate will give some readers a slight edge, but even newcomers will be able to tackle much of what's here, baking their way up to the trickiest, airiest echelons. Ingredients are likely to be accessible, but readers will have to invest in miniature tart pans--a purchase well worth it for anyone quickly dazzled by Shreveshire tarts, chocolate galaxy peticakes or pistachio petits fours. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Chronicle Books; Rev Exp edition (August 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811824462
• ISBN-13: 978-0811824460
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 0.9 x 7.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #76,645 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

84 of 86 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely fabulous recipes! November 22, 2000

By Nicole Harpe

Format:Paperback

I collect baking books. Most of them end up on a shelf. This is NOT one of those. I have made at least a dozen of these cookies and each one has been delicious, looked terrific, and been different from the typical cookie. Some are very easy to make - like Daddy Long Legs (a delicious hazelnut refrigerator cookie) and some are difficult (like the Buttercream "hedgehogs"), but all are lovely to place on your table. Some recipes call for odd ingredients like rice flour, but don't let that turn you away. There aren't too many of those.

The instructions are clear with a number of line drawings to help guide you through technique. This is a "must have" baking book for people tired of the same old same old same old.

At the end of the book, Ms. Braker offers great suggestions on preparing large quantities of baked goods. She talks about planning, how to freeze the cookies, how to present them, and how to decide which cookies to mix with others. This is a favorite of mine and will continue to be.

47 of 48 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Baking Technique applied to Miniatures by a Pro September 7, 2004

By B. Marold HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWER

Format:Paperback

Flo Braker's `Sweet Miniatures', just like her classic `The Simple Art of Perfect Baking' has been reissued with new material which validates the opinion of anyone who has read her works that Flo Braker knows a thing or two about baking. The introduction to this book also shows that unlike a lot of cookbook writers who do a volume on a particular subject such as fast cooking or Cuban cuisine or kosher empanadas because the subject is popular, Ms. Braker started her professional catering career baking miniatures and has specialized in them for over twenty years.

One very good thing is the fact that the book deals with exactly what you would expect from the title. The book is not about `petits fours', it is about small sweet foods for desserts or snacks, including cookies, pastries, and candies. It is also especially about baking technique rather than about fancy decorating. This is no craft book that happens to be about a baked product. This is a serious cookbook by a very serious writer on baking.

One of the very best things about the book is the introductory section on general baking technique, especially the essay on of the various types of mixing cookie doughs and their effects on the properties of the finished baked goods. This discussion starts with a theme common to her other books, which is that you should not discard mistakes. You can easily hit upon a different recipe by missing or overdoing a step. Her specific lesson came when she `overmixed' a sugar and butter creaming step when she left her mixer on to answer the telephone. The resulting batter produced cookies that were much lighter and higher and airier than usual. The explanation of Braker's discovery is in Shirley Corriher's `Cookwise' where she explains that the creaming of sugar in butter creates tiny air pockets that help leaven the product when the dough is baked. The remainder of Part I offers lots of other similar tips on general baking and on the special equipment recommended for making miniatures, most of which is the same stuff you use in general baking. I would recommend that Ms. Braker consider adding either photographs or line drawings of the specialized equipment. I have read and reviewed many books on baking, but she still uses some specialized terms that a picture would have made clear in a wink.

As someone who does not entertain, but who would like to, Ms. Braker's book gives me much more than simply more recipes. It tells me that miniatures are very popular with just about everyone, and it tells me how to organize my work to make two or three different recipes at the same time. This will come in very handy the next time I do my batches of four different Christmas cookies.

The first chapter of recipes presents 22 miniature variations on shortbread cookies. A first look at the recipes shows an acute attention to detail which distinguishes baking recipes from savory recipes and which distinguishes very good baking recipes from the run of the mill Wednesday newspaper recipes. One unusual ingredient in some of Braker's shortbread is non-glutinous rice flour, which you may only be able to find on the Internet or in better health food stores. One of the things which is so attractive about shortbread cookies is that they may be the pastry world's version of `refrigerator Velcro' in that they will accept as an ingredient just about any few ounces of leftover jam, preserve, nut, or nut butter you happen to have laying around. I don't recommend diving into leftover reclamation until you have your shortbread technique down pat, but here are 22 ideas for using up all that sweet stuff.

The second chapter deals with crispy lacy things which, like ice cream cones, often serve as a container for other good stuff. The first and most architypical recipe is for tuiles, which are all about egg whites, sugar, almonds and butter than they are about flour. This and other recipes like it are cases where a quick test run with a single cookie is well worth the time and effort, especially since I have never made a tuille.

The third chapter deals with spicy sweets, seasoned primarily with ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and allspice, `the cookie spices'. One of the best discoveries in this chapter is a recipe for `pains d'amande' or Belgian almond cookies.

The fourth chapter contains recipes for tartlets, which is what usually comes to mind when you think of miniatures. The first recipe is for a general pastry to be used to create shells for the other recipes. There is no mystery here. It is almost identical to making your favorite apple pie crust until you form the dough into fluted tartlet tins.

The fifth chapter of recipes covers pastries, puffs, raviolis, rolls, strudels, and turnovers made with phylo dough or puff pastry. The homemade dough of choice here is a sour cream pastry, with a variation using yogurt. Other special doughs are a cottage cheese dough, cream cheese pastry and heavy cream flaky pastry.

The sixth recipe chapter covers cake miniatures, including the few recipes that may properly be called petits fours. Here you get more meringue, more pistachio, and more fruit pastries, oh my.

The last recipe chapter deals with candy and has lots of important advice on dealing with chocolate, toffee, and caramel, leading up to recipes for butter crunch, candied apples, chocolate wafers, spicy marshmallows, and raspberry jellies.

The book finishes with the chapter on planning ahead. It may have been more appropriate to put this chapter at the beginning, so I warn you to check out the table of contents carefully before jumping into a recipe at random. Advice I would give for reading any cookbook.

A highly recommended book for general baking technique and insights into what people like.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Things in Small Packages July 5, 2003

By jerry i h

Format:Paperback

I like this "little" baking book very much. It is an entire book dedicated to the magic art of petit-fours, or small, french, bite-sized bits of desserts and sweets. There are some books on the subject, mostly professional. However, here is a simple, easy to follow book ideal for the home baker to make these wonderful little things.

The author has been a successful caterer for many years. She knows what is easy to make, and are also very popular things that people just love. Here is a collection of those recipes that meet both requirements. It is a baking book you will probably use very often. Be warned, however, that these wonderful little gems are very labor intensive. You will be slaving over the proverbial hot stove for rather long perions of time per recipe. Multiply that by three or four recipes, and it all adds up to a very long time. Fortunately, the author supplies proven, time-saving organizational tips in the last chapter. I also note that her hints and suggestions for decoration can be skimpy at times; decorating things this small is not an easy task.

My complaints are mostly organizational. Several basics, like cake or crust recipes, are used in multiple recipes, but are buried in the middle of chapters or embedded in one particular recipe. These should always be the first recipe in the relevant chapter on their own, or given a separate chapter by themselves. Also helpful would be a cross reference chart, so that one glance will tell you how many different petit-fours you can make with the same basic cake or crust recipe. It does have some charts at the end, but these are not organized by the base recipe. There are some pictures, and each one tells you what page the recipe is on; however, the reverse is not true: a recipe may have a picture, but you won't know it unless you check the pictures each time.