Homemade Desserts: 20 Scratch-Made Recipes for the Cozy Bakers Among Us
This book came out of a decade of me trying to become the kind of person who has warm cookies on a Tuesday.I am not that person naturally. I am a chaotic person who once forgot the sugar in a batch of shortbread and had to eat all twelve pieces of the evidence before my husband got home. What I am, though, is stubborn. I made brownies eleven weekends in a row until I figured out why mine kept coming out chalky. I burned six batches of caramel before I stopped being afraid of it. I now know, for example, that a shiny crackly brownie top is not magic. It is sugar. Specifically, dissolved sugar that recrystallizes on the surface as thin, glassy sheets while the interior stays fudgy — a phenomenon documented in cereal-baking research going back decades but which no home baker ever bothers to explain to you.That is what this book is. Recipes that have been made until they work every single time, plus the small pieces of food science that finally made them click for me.Inside you'll find twenty desserts across six chapters:The Cookie Jar — brown butter chocolate chip cookies that took me four years to lock down, old-fashioned snickerdoodles, Meyer lemon bars with an almond shortbread crustBrownies & Blondies — the fudgy cocoa brownie recipe I would put on my headstone, salted caramel blondies, peanut butter swirl browniesCakes & Cupcakes — vanilla bean bundt with brown butter glaze, Devil's Food layer cake with whipped ganache, carrot cake with proper cream cheese frosting, chocolate fudge cupcakesPies, Tarts & Crumbles — deep-dish apple crumble with an oat-almond topping, classic sour cherry pie, salted dark chocolate tartPuddings & Custards — vanilla bean panna cotta with roasted strawberries, dark chocolate pot de crème, bourbon bread puddingNo-Bake & Frozen Treats — a no-bake New York cheesecake, custard-base vanilla bean ice cream, chocolate truffles, and a tiramisu that will make people quiet at the tableEvery recipe includes a Cook's Note (the small fix that separates good from great) and a Science Spotlight with actual peer-reviewed research — Journal of Dairy Science, Cereal Chemistry, Food Hydrocolloids, and others. Not because you need to know it, but because once you understand why something works, you stop being afraid of it.What you get:61-page PDF ebook, professionally formatted for reading on screens or printingAll ingredients in metric weights first (a $12 kitchen scale changes your baking life more than any stand mixer)20 recipes, tested until they work every timeNot every dessert in the Western canon. Just twenty I actually bake, on repeat, some as showstoppers and most as Tuesday desserts made in one bowl and eaten straight off the wire rack.I hope you find something in here that becomes a Tuesday for you.
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