Baking by Flavor, by Lisa Yockelson. We spent a lot of time at school learning the correct techniques for baking the classic repertoire of cakes and tarts, along with icings and fillings; and an equal amount of time devoted to pastries—probably six weeks in all. I survived and even enjoyed it, my strong preference to savory cooking notwithstanding. Yockelson is well known to readers of the food section of the Washington Post. She has published extensively. Her signature is “flavor-accenting baked goods.” I remembered that getting my lemon-sugar cookie to where I liked it was all about enhancing flavors. So, maybe it was time to pick up a tome on baked desserts and see what a current master baker is up to.
To get a feel for the level of detail and soundness of techniques, I baked her lemon tart, which called for using cookie dough instead of pate sucrée to make the tart shell. Her instructions are clear and very detailed. Laborious in fact (she takes two paragraphs to tell the reader how to “blind bake” a tart shell without ever using the technical term). The ‘by flavor’ organization of the book is as inviting as it is innovative. An average of 22 pages is devoted to each of 13 flavors (chocolate gets 35). If, like the Little Woman, you don’t like almond, you can flip past it with the assurance that you will not see it again.
Yockelson knows her subject. She presents all the classics here, updated and inspired. If you do not have a confectionery baked goods cookbook, Baking by Flavor is well worth a look. For sure¸ this book will win an award next year.
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