![Sweet: Desserts from London's Ottolenghi [A Baking Book]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/813G15II8CL._AC_UL160_SR160,160_.jpg)
Wow. I buy baking and cookbooks regularly, quite often reading and scheming more so than baking from them. And this book is plenty pretty enough to just be a calorie-free, mini-vacay, coffee table kind of book, with its elegant and sophisticated looking treats lushly photographed through out. But that would be a shame because making something out of it is doable and delicious!
Features I appreciated in the book: Photos of the majority of the recipes; step-by-step photos and instructions in the "how to" section on decorating; little blue side note boxes with tips and important info; bookmark ribbon (although I could have used 2 or 3 to keep up with the 3-part cake recipes I made!).
It would have been nice to have metric measurements for the recipes. Most books from real bakers have that these days and even home cooks like me appreciate the accuracy a scale produces when baking.
This book arrived just as I was needing a birthday cake for my son's 16th birthday. As I was drooling over the gorgeous photography and dreaming of treats to make, I came across the Coconut Cake with Passion Fruit Curd and knew at once I wanted to give it a shot. One of my son's nicknames is Coconut, so I thought this might be a fun cake to try for him. I immediately scanned the ingredient list and found the only specialty item I would need was Passion Fruit purée, which I ordered right away. (More on that later.) I'm a self-taught home cook and baker, who does not do a lot of intensive baking. However, I was able to pull off this cake! It required 3 separate recipes: cake, Fruit Curd filling, 7-minute meringue frosting. It took a whole afternoon, but was so worth it! I was able to present my son with a really delicious birthday cake that looked almost like the photo in the book. I know he enjoyed it because after the first bite, he actually used words: "Wow. This is really good!" and ate all the leftovers himself the next day.
It's a 3 layer cake, so we had plenty leftover, even after our family of 9 went at it. So we took some to share with my sister's family and they all loved it too. It was definitely on the sweet side, but I was so pleased with how moist the cake turned out. Some of the recent cookbook cakes I've made have interesting flavor profiles and look impressive, but the cakes were on the dry side. Not this one!
AND it gets better. I only ended up using half the Fruit Curd and half the Meringue Frosting on the cake. I didn't want to just dump all of it, nor did I need a second cake. So I made tarts with the Passion Fruit Curd and meringues with the leftover frosting. I checked the book's recipe for meringues and saw it was very similar to the frosting recipe. I didn't want to take the time to pipe the pretty kisses featured in the book, so I just used teaspoons to make little organically shaped blobs, and baked them at 250F for a few hours like the recipe called for. I was not watching the meringues bake very closely and when I remembered to check them about 3 hours later, they were a toasty light brown color. I feared I'd ruined them, but we were delighted to discover they still had a nice texture and the most amazing toasted marshmallow flavor! Golly, were they good. And I don't even like meringues.
I just made the Tart Raspberry and Lemon Cake for another birthday. Again, the base Lemon cake was wonderfully moist, and had fantastic flavor. The raspberry lemon buttercream had the prettiest pink color from the purée - no artificial dye needed. However, I wasn't crazy about the full flavor. It hits your mouth with a wonderfully tangy raspberry and lemon flavor, but it follows up with a butter afternote that didn't fit with the other flavors of the cake. I used Kerrigold Irish butter, which I normally love. But I didn't want to taste it with the other flavors of this cake. I think next time I'll try flavoring the Meringue recipe with lemon and raspberry, or experiment with less butter. However, the rest of my family loved it.
So my adventures with Bobbette and Belle thus far have been a hit. The entire family looks forward to seeing how the rest of the recipes work out.
A note about Fruit purée - One of the nice little sidenotes in the Passion Fruit Curd recipe said to make sure I was getting purée and not fruit juice. Well, I thought I did. But I didn't. The "purée" I ordered turned out to be a drink mix and tasted exactly the way the book said it would - very sweet and not much flavor. Not withstanding this mistake, the cake was delicious. We really want to try it again with a strong, true Passion Fruit flavor. But some people like very sweet and even the tarts I made with the leftover Curd got eaten by a very happy 5 yr old.
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Reviewed in the United States on December 5, 2016
Features I appreciated in the book: Photos of the majority of the recipes; step-by-step photos and instructions in the "how to" section on decorating; little blue side note boxes with tips and important info; bookmark ribbon (although I could have used 2 or 3 to keep up with the 3-part cake recipes I made!).
It would have been nice to have metric measurements for the recipes. Most books from real bakers have that these days and even home cooks like me appreciate the accuracy a scale produces when baking.
This book arrived just as I was needing a birthday cake for my son's 16th birthday. As I was drooling over the gorgeous photography and dreaming of treats to make, I came across the Coconut Cake with Passion Fruit Curd and knew at once I wanted to give it a shot. One of my son's nicknames is Coconut, so I thought this might be a fun cake to try for him. I immediately scanned the ingredient list and found the only specialty item I would need was Passion Fruit purée, which I ordered right away. (More on that later.) I'm a self-taught home cook and baker, who does not do a lot of intensive baking. However, I was able to pull off this cake! It required 3 separate recipes: cake, Fruit Curd filling, 7-minute meringue frosting. It took a whole afternoon, but was so worth it! I was able to present my son with a really delicious birthday cake that looked almost like the photo in the book. I know he enjoyed it because after the first bite, he actually used words: "Wow. This is really good!" and ate all the leftovers himself the next day.
It's a 3 layer cake, so we had plenty leftover, even after our family of 9 went at it. So we took some to share with my sister's family and they all loved it too. It was definitely on the sweet side, but I was so pleased with how moist the cake turned out. Some of the recent cookbook cakes I've made have interesting flavor profiles and look impressive, but the cakes were on the dry side. Not this one!
AND it gets better. I only ended up using half the Fruit Curd and half the Meringue Frosting on the cake. I didn't want to just dump all of it, nor did I need a second cake. So I made tarts with the Passion Fruit Curd and meringues with the leftover frosting. I checked the book's recipe for meringues and saw it was very similar to the frosting recipe. I didn't want to take the time to pipe the pretty kisses featured in the book, so I just used teaspoons to make little organically shaped blobs, and baked them at 250F for a few hours like the recipe called for. I was not watching the meringues bake very closely and when I remembered to check them about 3 hours later, they were a toasty light brown color. I feared I'd ruined them, but we were delighted to discover they still had a nice texture and the most amazing toasted marshmallow flavor! Golly, were they good. And I don't even like meringues.
I just made the Tart Raspberry and Lemon Cake for another birthday. Again, the base Lemon cake was wonderfully moist, and had fantastic flavor. The raspberry lemon buttercream had the prettiest pink color from the purée - no artificial dye needed. However, I wasn't crazy about the full flavor. It hits your mouth with a wonderfully tangy raspberry and lemon flavor, but it follows up with a butter afternote that didn't fit with the other flavors of the cake. I used Kerrigold Irish butter, which I normally love. But I didn't want to taste it with the other flavors of this cake. I think next time I'll try flavoring the Meringue recipe with lemon and raspberry, or experiment with less butter. However, the rest of my family loved it.
So my adventures with Bobbette and Belle thus far have been a hit. The entire family looks forward to seeing how the rest of the recipes work out.
A note about Fruit purée - One of the nice little sidenotes in the Passion Fruit Curd recipe said to make sure I was getting purée and not fruit juice. Well, I thought I did. But I didn't. The "purée" I ordered turned out to be a drink mix and tasted exactly the way the book said it would - very sweet and not much flavor. Not withstanding this mistake, the cake was delicious. We really want to try it again with a strong, true Passion Fruit flavor. But some people like very sweet and even the tarts I made with the leftover Curd got eaten by a very happy 5 yr old.
worth your money just for the photos and styling, but the recipes are even better
Reviewed in the United States on December 5, 2016
Wow. I buy baking and cookbooks regularly, quite often reading and scheming more so than baking from them. And this book is plenty pretty enough to just be a calorie-free, mini-vacay, coffee table kind of book, with its elegant and sophisticated looking treats lushly photographed through out. But that would be a shame because making something out of it is doable and delicious!Reviewed in the United States on December 5, 2016
Features I appreciated in the book: Photos of the majority of the recipes; step-by-step photos and instructions in the "how to" section on decorating; little blue side note boxes with tips and important info; bookmark ribbon (although I could have used 2 or 3 to keep up with the 3-part cake recipes I made!).
It would have been nice to have metric measurements for the recipes. Most books from real bakers have that these days and even home cooks like me appreciate the accuracy a scale produces when baking.
This book arrived just as I was needing a birthday cake for my son's 16th birthday. As I was drooling over the gorgeous photography and dreaming of treats to make, I came across the Coconut Cake with Passion Fruit Curd and knew at once I wanted to give it a shot. One of my son's nicknames is Coconut, so I thought this might be a fun cake to try for him. I immediately scanned the ingredient list and found the only specialty item I would need was Passion Fruit purée, which I ordered right away. (More on that later.) I'm a self-taught home cook and baker, who does not do a lot of intensive baking. However, I was able to pull off this cake! It required 3 separate recipes: cake, Fruit Curd filling, 7-minute meringue frosting. It took a whole afternoon, but was so worth it! I was able to present my son with a really delicious birthday cake that looked almost like the photo in the book. I know he enjoyed it because after the first bite, he actually used words: "Wow. This is really good!" and ate all the leftovers himself the next day.
It's a 3 layer cake, so we had plenty leftover, even after our family of 9 went at it. So we took some to share with my sister's family and they all loved it too. It was definitely on the sweet side, but I was so pleased with how moist the cake turned out. Some of the recent cookbook cakes I've made have interesting flavor profiles and look impressive, but the cakes were on the dry side. Not this one!
AND it gets better. I only ended up using half the Fruit Curd and half the Meringue Frosting on the cake. I didn't want to just dump all of it, nor did I need a second cake. So I made tarts with the Passion Fruit Curd and meringues with the leftover frosting. I checked the book's recipe for meringues and saw it was very similar to the frosting recipe. I didn't want to take the time to pipe the pretty kisses featured in the book, so I just used teaspoons to make little organically shaped blobs, and baked them at 250F for a few hours like the recipe called for. I was not watching the meringues bake very closely and when I remembered to check them about 3 hours later, they were a toasty light brown color. I feared I'd ruined them, but we were delighted to discover they still had a nice texture and the most amazing toasted marshmallow flavor! Golly, were they good. And I don't even like meringues.
I just made the Tart Raspberry and Lemon Cake for another birthday. Again, the base Lemon cake was wonderfully moist, and had fantastic flavor. The raspberry lemon buttercream had the prettiest pink color from the purée - no artificial dye needed. However, I wasn't crazy about the full flavor. It hits your mouth with a wonderfully tangy raspberry and lemon flavor, but it follows up with a butter afternote that didn't fit with the other flavors of the cake. I used Kerrigold Irish butter, which I normally love. But I didn't want to taste it with the other flavors of this cake. I think next time I'll try flavoring the Meringue recipe with lemon and raspberry, or experiment with less butter. However, the rest of my family loved it.
So my adventures with Bobbette and Belle thus far have been a hit. The entire family looks forward to seeing how the rest of the recipes work out.
A note about Fruit purée - One of the nice little sidenotes in the Passion Fruit Curd recipe said to make sure I was getting purée and not fruit juice. Well, I thought I did. But I didn't. The "purée" I ordered turned out to be a drink mix and tasted exactly the way the book said it would - very sweet and not much flavor. Not withstanding this mistake, the cake was delicious. We really want to try it again with a strong, true Passion Fruit flavor. But some people like very sweet and even the tarts I made with the leftover Curd got eaten by a very happy 5 yr old.
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Top reviews from other countries
Chelen Petrucci
Pastry at its absolute best! A must-have.
Reviewed in Canada on October 7, 2016
