LAROUSSE: ON PASTRY (HB 2012)

The recipes are in cups, suppose to have in grams

Bought it as a gift for my pastry chef daughter. She was thrilled.

I bought this as an eBook on apple and wanted to actually physically turn pages. SO glad I purchased!! Beautiful book with a great size to it. Looking forward to baking from it!!

I love cookbooks and buy quite a few. This book and its companion volume "Larousse: on Cooking" are my favourite new purchases, destined to stay in my kitchen for quite a while. I like everything about both books but will now concentrate on the book I'm reviewing, namely Larousse: on Pastry. There are 200 recipes from beginner to expert, covering every kind of dessert you might want to make, including some you may not have heard of before, with clear and friendly directions. The book is divided into chapters: All-time favourites, Chocolate, Fancy fruit, Party time, Cookies, Summer Sweets, Small Snacks, with helpful sections in the back such as pastry workshop, illustrated utensils, etc. The simplest recipes are identified with useful symbols like "Child's Play", "Never Fails". All the recipes are interesting, most are quite different from what can be found in other books, and none are intimidating or particularly time-consuming. Some need a little more skill than others. I have only made three so far, and they came out perfectly and looked like restaurant desserts: Mascarpone Pie (a never fails recipe), Far Breton, a clafouti-like dessert from Brittany with prunes and raisins (a child's play recipe) and English Apple Crumble with rum and raisins in the apple filling (a never fails recipe). There is a recipe for a different kind of rhubarb pie that I'm looking forward to trying and several decadent chocolate desserts. Each recipe has an excellent full-page photograph so you can see exactly what it will look like. The paper is high quality, as is the binding. Highly recommended.

It is not clear what the relationship of this book is to the Larrousse Gastronomique (beyond the name) and many of the recipes have nothing to do with pastry (there is, for example, a whole chapter on fruit desserts). Nonetheless, this is a fun cookbook. Each recipe has a large colour photo, the instructions are generally clear and there is a nice range of difficulties from slice, spice and serve to serious kitchen work. There will be dessert ideas for everyday and special occasions. It would have been nice if the ingredients were in metric as well as Imperial, and good cooks often use weight rather than volume measures for baking. My other quibble is that this book will not really help you learn to do great pastry -- it gives fairly limited instructions and assumes a certain familiarity with technique. Still, I was happy to put this volume on my cookbook shelf.

I've made the French pound cake, brownies, and chocolate chip cookies. Everybody liked them. The recipes are not difficult and come out well. It's an excellent baking book.

Lacking in technical detail, good for beginners