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Inkling Cooks: Dessert For Two by Christina Lane

Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Title: Dessert For Two
Author: Christina Lane
Genre: Cookbook
Publisher: Countryman Press
Date: February 3, 2015
Length: 230 pages

My dad gave me this book for my birthday

Who doesn't love towering three-layer cakes with mounds of fluffy buttercream? Who can resist four dozen cookies fresh from the oven? Wouldn't you love to stick your spoon into a large bowl of banana pudding? What about the leftovers? Dessert recipes typically serve eight to ten people. Finding the willpower to resist extra slices of cake can be difficult; the battle between leftover cookies and a healthy breakfast is over before it started. Until now. Dessert for Two takes well-loved desserts and scales them down to make only two servings. Cakes are baked in small pans and ramekins. Pies are baked in small pie pans or muffin cups. Cookie recipes are scaled down to make 1 dozen or fewer. Your favorite bars: brownies, blondes, and marshmallow cereal treats are baked in a bread loaf pan - which happily serves two when cut down the middle. Newly married couples (and empty-nesters) will be particularly enthralled with this miniature dessert guide. To everyone who lives alone: have your own personal-sized cake and eat it, too.

Description from Goodreads

My son is a ridiculously picky eater and putting together school lunches for him is very stressful. In order to keep my son from getting bored, I'll alternate his sweet and savory snacks during the week. Typically this means I make two desserts over the weekend, package up what I need for lunches, and then give the rest to coworkers on Monday. (This prevents my husband from snacking when he gets home and ruining his dinner and making me angry.) I first ran across Lane's blog when I found her 1 Dozen Cut-Out Sugar Cookies recipe on Pinterest (they're also in the book). This isn't my favorite sugar cookie recipe ever, but I love that it makes a small batch of tasty cookies, the dough doesn't go in and out of the fridge 50 times, I don't have loads of leftover icing, and it's easy. And that's the great thing about this cookbook, I can easily try out different desserts without using loads of ingredients and making huge messes. If the kids don't like it, I'm not stuck with 24 cupcakes or an entire cake they don't want.

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Inkling Cooks: My Sweet Kitchen by Linda Lomelino

Wednesday, February 8, 2017

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Title: My Sweet Kitchen

Author: Linda Lomelino

Genre: Cook Books

Publisher: Roost Books

Date: February 7, 2017

Length: 176 pages

I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

With an offset spatula laden with buttercream in one hand and a camera in the other, Linda Lomelino has made her mark as one of the most exciting recipe creators and food photographers in the world. My Sweet Kitchen, Linda's third cookbook, is bursting with many of her favorite recipes for cookies, cakes, pies, cupcakes, donuts, spoon desserts, and other sweet delights.

Linda's desserts are renowned for their elegant blend of classic flavor combinations and unexpected style. Along with nearly 50 original recipes, the book also contains three chapters chock-full of tips on how to bake, decorate, style, and photograph your own creations at home.

Linda Lomelino openheartedly shares her secrets for successful baking, telling us what we should always keep in our well-stocked pantries for best results. What should we prioritize when baking complex cakes? Is it best to use a kitchen scale to weigh ingredients? (Hint: "accurate measurements" and "yes"!) With her trademark atmospheric photographs, every recipe in the book comes to life. Linda also shows us how to pipe icing, frost cakes, decorate with edible flowers, style food to be shared (and "liked") on social media, and even how to tell if we should invest in a new camera to take food photography to the next level. If you have even the slightest sweet tooth, this book will hook you.

Description from Goodreads

This is a delicious looking book and with recipes even a novice banker could tackle. The whole cookbook is just so pretty that I was a little intimidated at first. Was I going to have all of the equipment and space needed while children ran around trying to “help”? Did I need to go to a specialty grocery store to find ingredients? Was I going to have to babysit the bake through each step of the process? Nope, turns out these recipes were totally do-able with limited counter space. I could have half my attention on the baking and the other half on the kids. The ingredients weren’t expensive and could be picked up at my local store. Anything I felt was too "specialty" to bother with was easily substituted. I tried some of the recipes and my family loved them. Kid 2 and my dad especially loved the chocolate chip cookies. (Kid 2 loved everything, I had to take more pictures than anticipated because the corners always seemed to have blurry hands in mid grab.)

Recipes are a range of easy to fiddley, but nothing too overwhelming. I tend to save more involved recipes for holidays when I have more time. My dad is retired, has discovered baking, and LIVES for fiddley. This book is right up his ally and he's now going through Lomelino’s recipe blog. He’s ready for berries to be in season because he really wants to try her Barry Galettes recipe.