5 New Baking Books to Gift This Season: A Chat With Margaret Roach
This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure policy.
If you are looking for a gift for the baker in your life, good news: you have lots of options this year. You also face a difficult decision: which one to buy??
I recently spoke with my friend Margaret Roach, the master gardener behind A Way to Garden, about five new baking books, all of which are fabulous, all of which provide both volume and metric measurements, all of which promise to fill your kitchen with deliciousness this winter and beyond.
You can listen to our conversation over on A Way to Garden, where you also can enter a five-book giveaway 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉 Margaret and I are each giving away a copy of the five books we discuss in our chat. Find the giveaway details below.
PS: Margaret Roach’s Garden is Magical
PPS: Margaret’s book, A Way to Garden, is a must for the gardener in your life.
Sarah Kieffer’s 100 Cookies
In 100 Cookies, Sarah Kieffer writes: “In my childhood kitchen, cookies were a foundation, a stepping-stone to baking, a rite of passage.”
I love this sentiment, and as we potentially head into another quarantine, this book would be such a great one to have on hand, especially for budding bakers. There are metric measurements for each recipe, and as Margaret noted in our conversation, paring this book (or any of the others) with a digital scale would make a great gift.
My 9- and 10-year-olds have been weighing out all of the ingredients, and then we’ve been assembling the cookies together. We are loving the brown butter chocolate chip cookies and the brown sugar cookies, but I have no doubt every recipe in this book is a winner.
Sarah is an incredibly reliable recipe writer, and I love her precise instructions, in particular that she gives weights for the actual portioned cookie dough balls — so helpful!
If you are a fan of Sarah’s pan-banging cookies, there are 12 variations of that cookie in the book as well as an extensive troubleshooting section about that cookie alone.
Yossy Arefi’s Snacking Cakes
Yossy Arefi describes a snacking cake as “a single layer cake, probably square, covered with a simple icing — or nothing at all — and it must be truly easy to make. It’s a cake that makes an ideal breakfast to-go, wrapped in a paper napkin, and a perfect little sweet to have alongside coffee in the afternoon.”
I am loving Snacking Cakes for a number of reasons, but namely:
- The recipes are simple: truly, none requires much more than a bowl, a whisk, and a reasonably well-stocked pantry.
- As promised, some of the recipes come together before your oven reaches temperature.
- Because none of the cakes requires creaming butter and sugar (but instead calls for oil or melted butter), most of them come together in a single bowl.
I have made the powdered donut cake several times, and my children devour it every time. I love the lemon-olive oil cake, and I’m dying to make the cocoa yogurt cake, which I heard Yossy say in an interview is maybe her favorite recipe in the book.
Erin Jeanne McDowell’s The Book on Pie
In The Book on Pie, Erin Jeanne McDowell writes: “Pie has a miraculous ability to be simultaneously comforting and special occasion worthy, both homey and fancy. “
So true.
The Book on Pie not only celebrates pie but also demystifies the pie-baking process. Throughout the book, you very much get the sense that Erin is trying to remove the fear from pie baking, an intimidating process for many home cooks.
I love that you can feel Erin’s love of teaching in every page of this book. In the introduction, Erin says she “wanted to create a true handbook filled with all the things [she’s] learned.”
She succeeded.
I am finding her explanation of parbaking and blind baking — probably my least favorite thing to do in the kitchen — very helpful. She inspired me in fact to parbake the crusts for my Thanksgiving pies this year. (More on this soon!)
The pies in this book vary from classics such as apple, lemon-meringue, chess, and chocolate-pecan but there are so many fun and inspiring ideas, too: cherry clafoutis pie, cheesecake pie, Tres leches slab pie, to name a few. There are savory pies, too.
Claire Saffitz’s Dessert Person
In Dessert Person, Claire Saffitz writes: “Rolling out a pie crust or cutting biscuits is my version of doing yoga. Dessert is in my DNA.”
I love this. If you have made any of the dessert recipes in Bon Appetit in recent years, you’ve likely made one of Claire’s. This rhubarb custard cake is one of my favorites, so I loved reading in the introduction that fruit desserts are her preference.
This book is filled with fruit desserts, and unlike the three previously mentioned books, this one is more of a general dessert cookbook. There are recipes for cakes, pies, cookies, bars, and more. There are savory baking recipes as well.
One thing that struck me: Claire believes there’s no such thing as a foolproof recipe, which more and more I am learning to be true — from ovens and pans to humidity and altitude, the many variables affecting how a recipe will turn out in someone else’s kitchen simply cannot be controlled.
Because of this Claire gives lots of indications — visual cues — throughout the recipes to help you along. For instance, she’ll never just say: “bake a cake until a tester comes out clean.” She’ll tell you how it will look, how it will feel, and how it will smell. How nice?
I have yet to bake anything, but these three recipes are calling my name:
- Blood Orange and Olive Oil Upside-Down Cake
- Goat Cheese Cake with Honey and Figs
- Minty Lime Bars
Melissa Weller’s A Good Bake
In A Good Bake, Melissa Weller writes about an aha moment she had upon thinking about the cookbooks she learned from early on in her career: “If those recipes had just given a little hint about this or that, a little more detail here or there, my baked goods would have turned out looking like those in the pictures that inspired me to want to make them to begin with. I knew then that I wanted to write a cookbook.”
A Good Bake is a compilation of 15 years of training, working, and note-taking — it’s the book Melissa Weller wishes she had when she was starting out.
Melissa trained at the French Culinary Institute in New York City and worked at Babbo, Jim Lahey’s restaurants, Thomas Keller’s restaurants, and Roberta’s. But before she was a baker, she was a chemical engineer.
If you are someone who appreciates a scientific approach to baking, you will love this book. In the introduction, Melissa writes: “Asking questions — lots of them — is integral to being an engineer: a chemical engineer or an engineer of dough.” Melissa attributes her love of science and baking as well as her curiosity for shaping her career in pastry and bread.
Like Dessert Person, A Good Bake is an overall dessert cookbook, with recipes for breads, pastries, pies, tarts, cakes, quick breads, cookies, bars, and more.
If you want to learn how to make laminated pastry, from croissants to kouign amann, this is a great resource. If you want to learn how to make flaky buttermilk biscuits or tender, buttery pie dough, Melissa will show you how. If you want to learn how to build a sourdough starter from scratch, there’s a tutorial for that, too.
I have yet to bake anything, but these three recipes are calling my name:
- Black Sesame Kouign Amann
- Cinnamon Swirl Sour Cream Bundt Cake
- Flourless Chocolate Olive Oil Cake
To Enter the Giveaway
A Way to Garden and I are each giving away five cookbooks. To enter, answer this question in the comment box at the bottom of the page (then copy and paste it into the comment box over at Margaret’s website):
Tell us what your favorite new cookbook is and what recipe you are loving from it.
We’ll each select 5 winners on December 13th and notify you then. UPDATE: The Giveaway is closed. The winners — Thao, Jenn S., Xenia, Urszula, and Samota — have been emailed.
This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure policy.
511 Comments on “5 New Baking Books to Gift This Season: A Chat With Margaret Roach”
I’m loving The Pastry Chef’s Guide by Ravneet Gill – it’s so informative and detailed for unsure bakers and her chocolate chip cookie recipe is incredible.
This Will Make It Taste Good, the new cookbook from Vivian Howard. We like her Tomato Pie.
Ottolenghi’s Simple is hands down my favorite. I make so many recipes on repeat!
I just got Ruth Mar Tams cookbook Baked To Order and I love the chicken pot pie recipe, with variations for beef and fish! Can’t wait to make it for dinner soon. Yum!
I’m loving Pastry Love by a Joanne Chang of Flour Bakery!
Have been loving the Dude Diet cookbooks this year for healthy-ish recipes that my husband loves. Every Sunday I make him Oatmeal Blueberry pancakes from the second book – so good.
I actually pre ordered 100 Cookies (shout out to a hometown writer/baker!) earlier this year and have LOVED the few things I have tried out already!
My new favorite cookbook is an an oldie, Sunset Cookbook of Breads! And of course I’ve been trying out sour dough bread recipes with quite a few failures but I’m pressing on.
My favorite book is Sweet Laurel and i Love making the banana bread recipe!
100 cookies by Sarah Kiefer is a great read and full of delicious cookie recipes. My favorite so far has been the Neopolitan cookie- so pretty and reminiscent of that old ice cream flavor that my husband and I enjoyed as children.
It’s actually 100 Cookies by Sarah Kieffer! I ordered it earlier this year and have been baking my way through the entire thing. I am currently on cookie number 20! It’s been a wonderful new challenge to take on while I have been spending a ton of time at home. At the moment my current favorite is a tie between the Neapolitan cookies and the fudgy brownies.
I have been loving your book since last Christmas and making so many breads! But second option for a newer cookbook is hopes table! I love her recipe and her honey bacon roasted green beans have become a favorite side dish for us.
Too hard to choose just one… I’m really enjoying Tartine, The Perfect Cookie, and Rose’s Heavenly Cakes at the moment. 🙂
My favorite new cookbook is One Tin Bakes (treated myself!) and I’ve made the chocolate chip tahini bars several times!
It’s too hard to choose just one, but I must say one of my favorites is Bread Toast Crumbs. I received the best compliment when I made the soup bread bowls for friends and they asked which bakery I bought them from because they wanted to buy some because they were so delicious! Can’t get enough of all the delicious recipes in this book.
Thank you, Jeanne! 🙂 🙂 🙂
My latest favorite is Sarah’s ginger molasses pan banging cookies in her book and on her website. I have made them 4 times within the month of November. If I win, I will gift her book but selfishly keep the others. 🙂
Always look forward to your seasonal podcasts with Margaret Roach and of course your blog posts with many easy, delicious recipes. Thank you!
My goal this winter is to LEARN how to bake a good GF bread using a GF flour that doesn’t have any rice in it. My daughter Carrie has an allergy to “all” rice and is also GF. I know that it’s going to take a lot of practice, but it’s my New Years’ resolution. I am going to start this project by purchasing the Bread to Toast book. If anyone has had any good results using a certain type of flour, please post. I need all the help that I can get!!! Thank you…..Carol
All of these make me look forward to getting into baking season! It’s not new, but lately I have enjoyed revisiting Six Seasons as we transition into the winter season. I always find something new to inspire me from that cookbook. Lately, the roasted cabbage with walnuts and parmesan has been on repeat.
My new favorite cookbook is Monet’s Palate Cookbook, but I don’t have a favorite recipe yet – I just got it.
My favorite new cookbook is 100 Cookies! My sister gave it to me for my birthday. The sesame chocolate chip pan banging cookies have been a game changer! The Neapolitans were also incredible and I continue working my way through.
I just got Dessert Person — lovely surprise in the mail from a friend — I haven’t had a chance to try anything yet, but I’ve flagged a lot of recipes and Chocolate Wave Cake is high on the list.
Loving “ZOE BAKES CAKES” the TURTLE CAKE! ❤️🎂
I would be so overjoyed to win these cookbooks! I’m even asking for Christmas for a new shelf to display my collection of cookbooks! I’d love to have these to put on my shelf! ❤️🎂🎅🏻
I’m loving baking my way through Midwest Made! I love many recipes but my top two would be Glazed Apple Slices and Caramel Canvas Blondies! So good!
Salt Fat Acid and Heat by Samin Nosrat! Fav recipe is her Chinese 5 spice chicken !
I’m loving The Slanted Door and especially the Vietnamese Chicken Salad
I am working my way through Bish Bash Bosh! from the Bosh vegan cooks/bakers. I love the books and their youtube videos. I love their Bakewell tart.
My new favorite cookbook? Well, I’m hoping to win one! For Thanksgiving, since the family were all staying home due to Covid, I asked my son what his favorite desert would be. No need to make a half dozen pies since it was a paired down celebration. He said he loves cheesecake but also wanted pumpkin pie. We looked in our Food network magazines and found a cheesecake, pumpkin pie mash up and we decided that it needed a chocolate graham cracker crust. It turned out great – just the non-traditional desert for our non-traditional Thanksgiving that we needed. Ok, we also did a blueberry and a pecan pie – the other boys have their favorites too.
My favorite new cookbook is actually 100 Cookies! I love it and would love to gift it if I win this prize. My current favorite recipe in it is the Neapolitan Cookies. Thank you for this wonderful prize package!
I am loving Flavor by Ottolenghi. His flavor bombs are awesome.