Oct 06

Cookbook 202: Dessert Person

This isn’t my cookbook, it belongs to James who loves Claire Saffitz (which is fair, because she’s lovely), and so he was excited when Dessert Person: Recipes and Guidance for Baking with Confidence was published and bought a copy of it.

The recipes all look amazing, the photography is beautiful and sound like something you want to try to make. I use the would “try” there purposefully. This is a book for people who are already very familiar with baking cakes and other sweet items, written by a classically trained patisserie chef. This is not a book for an enthusiastic amateur, unless you’re willing to make several versions of each dish, improving as you go. Many of the cakes/desserts in this book take a very long time to cook, because there are several parts to each recipe before it finally comes together.

The cakes I made for this were at varying degrees of success. I am happy to leave James to cook through this book, but I’m not going to return to it. I love cakes and desserts, but I want mine to be much less effort overall. Three out of five stars.

I’m including the metric measurements provided in the book (except for oven temperatures where I am converting them myself because they weren’t included), because US cup measures and tablespoons are a different size to metric/Australian ones.

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Aug 02

Cookbook 201: Nadiya’s Everyday Baking

Nadiya’s Everyday Baking by Nadiya Hussain, winner of the sixth season of the Great British Bakeoff, is an ode to the oven and all the delicious foods that can be baked. It covers both savoury and sweet recipes from snacks through to main dishes. When I bought this I thought it would be just the usual things you get when a recipe book says “baking”, meaning cakes, biscuits, slices, and the like. The inclusion of many savoury dishes rounds out this book nicely, and with the lovely photographs, makes you want to try all the recipes throughout. Another very helpful feature is that the recipes are tagged vegetarian, vegan, gluten free, so it’s easy to find dishes to make for people with dietary requirements.

I choose two savoury, a main and a picnic snack, and one sweet, a cake, from this book. There are plenty more recipes to try out. Overall 4 out of 5 stars.

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Jul 27

Cookbook 200: Destination Flavour – People and Places

Wow, 200 cookbooks. I still have more to go (because I did start buying them again) and this will probably never stop unless people stop publishing interesting cookbooks.

Destination Flavour: People and Place by Adam Liaw is excellent. I loved all the recipes I cooked, the focaccia was amazing and I want to go back and cook several of them again (I keep wanting to make the focaccia it is that good). 5 stars out of 5. Do recommend.

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Nov 02

Cookbook 199: Baking Yesteryear

Of course you all know B Dylan Hollis right? You’ve seen his videos on TikTok or YouTube and you’ve laughed along with his double (or single) entendres while he cooks a recipe he’s found in some antique book store or that has been shared with him by friends. And it made perfect sense that after trialling old recipes and becoming internet famous (and probably actual famous) he’d put out a cookbook of good recipes he’d discovered and a handful of bad ones. B Dylan Hollis’s Baking Yesteryear: the best recipes from the 1900s to the 1980s was the result.

It was hard to choose what to cook from this book. I started at the beginning, as you do, and almost chose the first several recipes on reading alone. I eventually settled on a handful which I cooked over a couple of weekends, with one that I cooked twice already (because I didn’t do a good job the first time). If you like cakes that aren’t overly sweet, this is definitely a great cookbook for starters. It also helps that Hollis has included metric measurements for things so that translating the recipe across to metric isn’t too difficult. Overall 4.5 stars out of 5 and I can’t wait to cook more from this book.

All cup measures in the text below are US imperial cups – so use the weight instead.

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Aug 27

Cookbook 198: Recipetin Eats Dinner

I have an admission. Prior to opening this cookbook I had no idea who Nagi Maehashi was nor what Recipetin Eats was. I saw a lot of people raving about the cookbook, but despite my terminal online-ness and love of recipes and good instructions, I had completely missed this whole show, which is my loss. To make up for it I bought Nagi Maehashi’s Recipetin Eats Dinner and cooked from it the next weekend after it arrived.

I made two main courses and one dessert (over a couple of nights because time) and one main worked perfectly, another needed a bit of adjustment (on my side, I think I used the wrong sized dish) and the dessert was amazing. Four and a half stars out of five.

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Aug 27

Cookbook 197: Tonight’s Dinner

Tonight’s Dinner: Home cooking for every day by Adam Liaw was a Christmas present… in 2022 if my memory serves me correctly. At the end of last year (2023) I received a crate of mangoes as part of a fundraiser for a local school (yes I know I’m behind on updating this blog), and suddenly I needed to cook a lot of dishes with mangoes in them. So I made one of the most magical dishes ever from this cookbook, as well as two main courses. I can’t wait to tell you about the last dish, because it is going to be a thing when mangoes are cheap because OMG it was amazing and definitely a way to win at dinner parties. Five stars.

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Aug 26

Cookbook 196: 100 Great Breads

Never before have I been so disappointed by a cookbook. I know I have written about being disappointed by cookbooks before on this site, but this was THE most disappointing cookbook I have ever cooked from. To start with, zero stars. This book doesn’t deserve a single star, because it broke my heart and brain by being so incredibly wrong.

I suppose I should mention which book it is that I am disappointed in, and it’s Paul Hollywood’s 100 Great Breads. Paul Hollywood is supposed to be some kind of breadmaking genius and he may well be, he cannot, however, write a recipe to save himself. I made three different breads from this book and every single one of them had a point of failure in them. I wasn’t even looking for recipes to fail, but they all did. Steps were missing (important ones like kneading), or there was additional liquid that wasn’t mentioned in the ingredients, or the oven temperature/cook time was wrong. I’ll show you what I made and where it went wrong and you too can avoid this book like the plague. Paul, I expect an apology about how bad this book actually is (he doesn’t know this site exists, so I’m not likely to get one I know).

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Aug 26

Cookbook 195: The Italian Home Cook

A new (well it was when I bought it) cookbook by Silvia Colloca? Of course I was going to buy The Italian Home Cook: The 100 recipes you need to know, as soon as I could. I find Silvia Colloca’s recipes great, and her TV shows and stories fascinating. I also wish I could look like she does, but I can’t run/jog (thanks hEDS) so that isn’t going to happen.

From this book I cooked one vegetable side/snack dish (do want to make again), a chicken dish and a sweet dish which was strange, but I would make again. There are lots of very tasty recipes in this book that I want to try, so I will be cooking from it again. Overall 4 out of 5 stars.

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Jun 01

Cookbook 194: The Margaret Fulton Cookbook

I’ve loved Margaret Fulton since I found some of her themed cookbooks cheap at a newsagent or book store when I was in year 12. I’ve cooked from her Indian, casserole, quick meals, and Italian cookbooks. It was a sad day in 2019 when she passed away at the grand age of 94, as she was the first of her kind of writers in Australia, encouraging Australians to move away from very average stodge food (meat and three veg) to more creative dishes. I’ve just finished reading The Getting of Garlic by John Newton which is a fascinating look into the history of post-colonised Australian food and it explains why my pallet is so very different to my parents, because Australians really started getting into food in the 70s when I was born. I do recommend this book, I will probably overshare with people I’m in person with in the next little while, because it is SO very interesting.

Anyway, not the topic of this post. Today I’m writing up The Margaret Fulton Cookbook, which I bought shortly after her death and already seems to be out of print (rude). It is important to remember for whom Margaret Fulton was writing this cookbook for, given it’s a 50th anniversary reprint done in 2018. The recipes are simpler food than I normally consume these days, but regardless of that fact, they are still good, solid recipes of tasty food. Overall I give this 3.5 stars out of 5.

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Mar 30

Cookbook 193: The Really Quite Good British Cookbook

I’m going to start with the obvious. The Really Quite Good British Cookbook: THe food we love from 100 of our finest chefs, cooks, bakes and food heroes, edited by William Sitwell is, by far, the MOST ugly cookbook I own. It doesn’t matter how good it is, because I’m getting rid of it the moment I finish writing it up. Here is a picture of the cover, so you too can wonder how on earth the commissioning of this cover happened.

The whole aim of this cookbook was to raise money for the Trussell Trust, which runs foodbanks across the UK (sorry, “Britain”). The cover was made by Peter Blake who is known for his incredibly bright pop-art images. I’m not a fan, but the editor of this cookbook clearly is/was. The recipes in the cookbook are all donated by famous 100 UK cooks, bakers, and chefs. The range is quite extensive and is broken up into types of meals (eg breakfast, snacks, types of meat, grains and desserts). The dishes I made from the cookbook were fine, and I’m sure the rest of the recipes would also be fine, but I’m not going to keep it to find out. I bought it because it was incredibly cheap as no one was buying it (I’m not surprised). For the food I’d give it a 3 out of 5, for the presentation of the book (the cover) I give it 0 out of 5.

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