Baking: From My Home to Yours, Dorie Greenspan, Houghton Mifflin, 2006

Dorie Greenpsan has written what should be the defining home baking book for the beginning of the 21st century, as important as The Joy of Cooking was in the mid-20th Century. This book is for the home baker, not the pro-wannabe or over-exacting baker targeted by Martha Stewart and Rose Levy Birnbaum. There are a few recipes from her French training and her professional career, but most are American classics (biscuits, apple pie, chocolate layer cake). It covers breakfast through dessert.

This book first entranced me as I read it on my train ride home from work. It is a readable cookbook, more than simply directions. Greenspan discusses what makes each recipe special to her, and outlines basic techniques. By the end of the ride, I was hungry.

I wanted to bake every recipe in the book. I still do.

Her directions are excellent. At critical stages, she tells you what to expect. After cutting butter into flour for biscuits, she says the butter should be size of peas down to flakes of oatmeal, and everything in between. She recommends placing a cookie sheet under most baking pans to prevent over-baking the bottom. Each recipe includes appetizing variations.

Final results have been consistently good, although some recipes have had some easily-recoverable errors in the directions, such as forgetting to include the poppy seeds in the directions for the lemon poppy seed muffins or stating that a melted-chocolate hot-water mixture would be smooth, but actually seized (and un-seized when beaten into the buttercream). With luck, a corrected second edition will be published.

If you have only one book for baking, this is the book to have.