Taste of Home Baking, All NEW Edition: 725+ Recipes & Variations from Classics to Best Loved! [Ring-bound]

Taste of Home (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 20, 2011

Built on the success of the first book, this all new-edition of the best-selling baking binder offers 725 recipes perfect for baking at home. Sure to appeal to both those who have never baked and those looking to expand their skill set, it contains four brand-new chapters: a cupcake chapter, a coffee cakes and sweet rolls chapter, an almost homemade chapter that shows recipes made with convenience products, and a trimmed-down favorites chapter filled with delicious lighter recipes. This book is all about baking-from cookies, bars, and cakes to yeast breads, lighter baking and special holiday baking, including:

Best Chocolate Cake Recipe
Caramel Pecan Cheesecake
Dark Chocolate Butterscotch Brownies
Banana Nut Bread
Spice Cupcakes with Mocha Frosting
Walnut Pear Coffee Cake
Walnut- Caramel Sticky Buns
Upside-Down Apple Pie
Shortbread Ornament Cookies
Raspberry Cream Muffins

Some recipes are highlighted as Cooks Who Care recipes, an initiative that often caters to large groups who are in need-these recipes are great for any large crowd. Each and every recipe in the book originates from the Taste of Home kitchen, experts from the world's largest cooking magazine. The 5- ring binder lies flat when open and includes snap-in splash guards to protect the pages from food spills, and chapter tab dividers with a chapter index for quick reference. And with over 725 photos that illustrate mixing and baking methods and the delectable baked results, even the inexperienced baker will be well on their way to a delicious outcome.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Taste of Home is a leading multi-platform producer of information on food, cooking and entertaining, serving home cooks with engaging media that capture the joy and comfort received from food made with love. Taste of Home publishes three magazines (the flagship Taste of Home- America's largest cooking magazine, with a circulation of 3.2 million- Healthy Cooking and Simple & Delicious); top-selling bookazines; newsstand specials; and popular cookbooks and e-books. Tasteofhome.com is a top destination for engaging audiences with kitchen- tested recipes, how-to techniques, cooking videos and lively community forums.

Product Details

• Ring-bound: 510 pages
• Publisher: Readers Digest; Lslf New edition (September 20, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0898218462
• ISBN-13: 978-0898218466
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 10 x 2.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (105 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #239,546 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 42 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Just in time for the Holidays, a great sweet and savory book September 21, 2011

By beckygardens TOP 50 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Ring-bound|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Length: 3:48 Mins

I received my Taste of Home baking book and couldn't wait to start baking from it- see my picture under customer images for the Beautiful Swiss beer bread I made, it was delicious. The recipes include both sweet and savory, everything from two ingredients (palmier) to a bit more complicated like the apricot filled bread that needs to be started the night before, everything in between, and all baking levels.

Some very good and helpful parts of the cookbook are the equivalent chart, substitutions chart, and the first chapter on baking basics. Baking basics needs to be read first, so you know what flour, salt, etc they use, and what they mean by different words like the difference between stiff peaks and soft peaks.

With taste of home one isn't getting recipes that take four days to make, fifteen pages of techniques, and a bunch of one use only baking equipment. The ingredients are easy to find, most people will have 75% in their fridge and pantry already and the rest can easily be picked up in almost any market.

The book is pretty to look out, has a ton of pictures showing the end results, there are tips galore, at the beginning, end, and scattered throughout the recipes.

I usually don't like spiral books but with over 700 recipes it almost needs to be, or trying to lay the book out would cause spine damage. One very slick feature (shown on my video) are the page protectors included. Seriously, this is brilliant and should set the standard for all notebook type cookbooks.

Included is a year's subscription to Taste of Home magazine.

But it's all about how the food turns out. I try never to post a cookbook review until I've made several recipes, because books can look great and then I find out the directions are actually confusing or their are editing mistakes or the food just doesn't taste good. I spent two days baking (next thing I'm ordering from Amazon is a gel mat!) trying both savory and sweet. The beer cheese bread was delicious. I am usually disappointed in cheese breads because they aren't very cheesy. Taste of Home solves that issue by using a combination of cheese chunks and shredded cheese, so the flavor is all through the bread from the shredded cheese, while bursts of small cheese cubes hit our mouths. Although the recipe calls for swiss I bet this would be great with cheddar.

The walnut bars (page 79) made me laugh because they look so elegant with the glaze and crust, and they were dead easy! Delicious. The Palmier recipe is frozen puff pastry and sugar, but it worked!

I find the timing with my oven at the temperatures they use to be very on point. There do seem to be some gluten free recipes, a chapter on almost homemade that make use of mixes, a lighter chapter that honestly, I'll probably never use. Give me my butter!

Taste of home has produced a very usable and user friendly baking book that would be great for a beginning baker but still has plenty of awesome for more experienced bakers.

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Gorgeous, Comprehensive Book but Recipes are Real Mixed Bag October 17, 2011

By CrimsonGirl VINE™ VOICE

Format:Ring-bound|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

My kids and I love to bake, so we were really excited to receive a copy of the "Taste of Home Baking". From a visual standpoint, it falls under the "food p*rn" category. Hundreds of luscious-looking, full-color photos of decadent treats, oh my! Pretty much any dessert one might want to bake is included, often in multiple variations. If I were rating the cookbook purely on how well it makes me want to try its recipes, I'd give in 5 stars.

The directions are very clear and easy-to-follow, even for my 9 y.o., who is a novice baker.

Unfortunately, the results of those attempts have been a decidedly mixed bag.

Successes:

(1) Walnut-Caramel Sticky Buns on pg. 400. These were *AMAZING* and definitely worth the time spent.
(2) Apple Crunch Muffins on pg. 298. My kids inhaled these.
(3) Chewy Soft Pretzels on pg. 361. I'd never before made pretzels and these turned out well.
(4) Chocolate-Strawberry Celebration Cake on. pg. 419 (pictured in the lower right hand corner of the cover). I was skeptical about this "semi-homemade" recipe that uses boxed cake mix & instant pudding as its base. But I got lots of compliments on it from guests at my daughter's birthday.

Partial Successes:

(1) Orange Brownies on pg. 94. These were yummy but didn't taste at all orange-y.
(2) Morning Glory Muffins on pg. 298. These took 40 minutes to bake rather than the 20-25 minutes specified in the recipe. They also fell apart when taken out of the muffin tin. The taste was good, however.
(3) Vermont Honey Wheat Bread on pg. 330. The resulting loaf didn't look appetizing but tasted good. The leftovers made great French Toast the next morning.

Failure:
(1) Chunky Blonde Brownies on pg. 103. They never baked properly. The top got too browned before the bottom ever hardened. The bottom was the consistency of pecan pie filling and too sweet even for my kids.

Another thing that I really didn't like about "Taste of Home Baking" was that so many of the included recipes called for shortening. I haven't kept Crisco in my pantry in probably 15 or 20 years, ever since it came out about how horrible trans fat is for one's health. I was shocked to see it used as an ingredient so frequently- probably half of the cookie, cupcake, and pie recipes call for it. I checked a bunch of my other cookbooks, and those all call for butter rather than shortening in their dessert recipes.

Overall, I would give "Taste of Home Baking" a qualified recommendation. Definitely do a "test run" of each recipe before making it in a higher-stakes situation because it may or may not turn out the way you hope.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Love Love Love This Book! October 24, 2011

By Kitten Kisser VINE™ VOICE

Format:Ring-bound|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Book arrives. I show my husband. He starts to look at it. Next thing I know he is baking Black Forest Brownies AND Chocolate Chip Cookies. Yum! Yahoo! I figure I'll start baking up some goodies that caught my eye the following day since we can't both fit in the kitchen. Well well well, hubby beat me to it! Next day he is starting not only the Pizza Shop Pizzas he's also working on the Hearty Stromboli! Needless to say, I didn't make it into the kitchen that day much to my joy & frustration. The pizza was delicious. The Hearty Stromboli had too much bread/crust to it. Not sure if that's the fault of the recipe or my Husband. He said he couldn't believe how much dough the recipe made.

My turn in the kitchen I decided to make the Home-Style Yeast Bread. Well it came out super light & super crumbly. Not happy with it at all. Since yeast breads are so easy to mess up, it is highly possible that it is my fault. I normally make sourdough bread so I'm not used to fast rising yeast. I also made the Cinnamon Raisin Bread. I liked that a lot better because it was much more dense. I think I didn't let it rise long enough! Ugh! Oh well!

Let's see since I got the book we have also made, Oatmeal Raisin Cookies (these were a disaster totally flat & the second they cooled even a tad they were glued to the cookie sheet it was horrible), Soft Sugar Cookies (these were bland & cake like, but I think it's my fault. I will have to try again), Peanut Butter Cheesecake (yummy!), Simply Fudgy Brownies (Yum!) & many more. I have been flipping through the book while typing this trying to remember everything.

Even though every recipe hasn't been perfect or to our liking, I know we have a great baking book on our hands. Never have I owned a cook book that has been flipped through or used so much! I am nowhere near done, nor is my Husband. There are so many mouth watering recipes, I find myself in the kitchen baking a lot more than usual! Not only that, but there are entire sections I have yet to dive into. Oh boy the endless supply of baking possibilities!

A disappointment I had, was I wanted to make a traditional pumpkin pie & thought I'd use a new recipe from this book. Sadly, I didn't find such a recipe. There are very tasty looking pumpkin cookie, cheesecake, & Ginger Streusel Pumpkin Pie recipes, but not a good old fashioned pumpkin pie : Oh my! Just thinking about the pie section...I love pie!

The technical stuff: It's a BIG book. It's 3 ring binder style. The pages are thin & glossy. Full color. There are dividers breaking down the different baking methods such as: Baking Basics, Cookies, Bars & Brownies, Cakes, Cupcakes, Cheesecakes (yesss a whole section on cheesecake!!!), Pies & Tarts, Desserts, Muffins, Biscuits & Scones, Yeast Breads, Quick Breads, Coffee Cakes & Sweet Rolls, Almost Homemade, Yeast Rolls, Holiday Classics, Trimmed-Down Favorites, Alphabetical Index, General Index.

Each divider lists all the recipes in that section & the page they are on. It also lists the Tips & the pages they are on. On the inside of the cover you are provided with a Food Equivalents chart. On the inside back cover there is an Ingredient Substitutions chart. The very first page contains a card for one free year subscription to Taste of Home Magazine! Very cool, I mailed that baby in right away. They sent me an email confirming my subscription. I am so excited! I never read Taste of Home Magazine & after this awesome book, I am really looking forward to it!

If you love to bake or you know someone who does, this book is simply perfect in nearly every way! It is sure to get many years of use in our home. I'm already looking forward to baking delicious treats to give as gifts & to share over the Holidays!