Baking Chez Moi: Recipes from My Paris Home to Your Home Anywhere

by Dorie Greenspan

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Publication Date: October 2014

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Featured Recipe: Vanilla-Bean Sables

12 Days of Christmas Cookbook Giveaways, 2014:

Day 5, Baking Chez Moi

With her groundbreaking bestseller Around My French Table, Dorie Greenspan changed the way we view French food. Now, in Baking Chez Moi, she explores the fascinating world of French desserts, bringing together a charmingly uncomplicated mix of contemporary recipes (including original creations based on traditional and regional specialties) and drawing on seasonal ingredients, market visits, and her travels throughout the country. Examples are the surprisingly easy chocolate loaf cake speckled with cubes of dark chocolate that have been melted, salted, and frozen (a recipe that she adapted from a French chef’s recipe) and the boozy, slow-roasted pineapple, a five-ingredient cinch that she got from her hairdresser. These recipes show the French knack for elegant simplicity. In fact, many are so radically easy that they defy our preconceptions: crackle-topped cream puffs, which are all the rage in Paris; custardy apple squares from Normandy; and an unbaked confection of corn flakes, dried cherries, almonds, and coconut — a recipe that nearly every French woman knows. Whether it’s classic lemon-glazed madeleines, a silky caramel tart, or “Les Whoopie Pies,” Dorie puts her own creative spin on each dish, guiding us with the friendly, reassuring directions that have won her legions of ardent fans.

Cooks&Books&Recipes Featured Cook Donna:

I have a number of Dorie Greenspan’s cookbooks, so I had pretty high expectations for this one. It certainly didn’t disappoint. The recipes ranged from family dessert to fancy dessert and from simple to serious.

While the instructions on many of the recipes are longer than what you might find in a typical cookbook, it’s not that the recipes are complicated — it’s that they’re very well explained.

There are also bits of quirkiness within the instructions, like the comment that you should cover a cream with plastic wrap so that it doesn’t form a crust, followed by the warning, “Don’t do this before you stick your finger in the cream for a first taste.” Another recipe talks about pricking the dough all the way through and explains that you should hear the “rat-a-tat-tat” of the fork hitting the peel. Comments like these make the recipes much more friendly, even when you’re facing a French tart.

Cooks&Books&Recipes Editors {Dee}:

Written with home bakers in mind, Baking Chez Moi is organized into seven chapters: Plain Cakes; Fancy Cakes; Baby Cakes and Petit Pastries; Tarts and Galettes; Cookies and Bars; Fruit, Creams, Frozen Desserts, and Candies; and Basics. The personal and detailed headnotes transport the reader to Dorie’s kitchen in Paris. And where else would you want to be when baking dessert??

The Cookbook Basics:

Hardcover (8.4 x 10.9 inches)

496 pages, ~200 recipes

About the author: Dorie Greenspan has written 10 cookbooks and won six James Beard and IACP awards, including Cookbook of the Year, twice! She won the IACP Cookbook-of-the-Year Award for Desserts by Pierre Herme and for The New York Times best-seller Around My French Table. She was also named to the James Beard Foundation’s Who’s Who of Food and Beverage in America. She notes that her latest cookbook, Baking Chez Moi, is “filled with recipes for the simple, homey, wonderfully delicious sweets that my friends and I bake at home in Paris.”

Cookbook Giveaway:

We’re giving away a copy of Baking Chez Moi to one lucky Cooks&Books&Recipes reader. Enter below.

{The other 12 Days of Christmas Cookbook Giveaways are listed here.}

Giveaway Notes:

There are six ways to enter the giveaway, but it’s not necessary to do all six entries. Choose whichever one(s) you like, and you’ll be entered in the giveaway. The winner, to be randomly selected and notified by e-mail, must claim the cookbook within 10 days. Giveaway ends on Monday, January 19.

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Disclosure: Cooks&Books&Recipes receives books for possible review, though we make no promise that all books received will be featured. We highlight only those cookbooks that we feel will interest our readers. We received no monetary compensation for our review or giveaway.

Baking Chez Moi