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”
Salt, acid, fat, heat. Can’t stop making the pasta with broccoli and breadcrumbs.
I’ve been loving the bread section of Let Me Feed You by Rosie Daykin. We can’t get enough of her english muffin recipe! Great giveaway! Have really enjoyed the all the breads on your site Ali!
My favorite cookbook is Master the Wood Pellet Grill.
I can’t wait to try the brown sugar cookies.
I feel like I’m cheating because my favorite cookbook of the moment (and my newest) is yours! My favorite recipe is the Oatmeal Maple Bread, and I love using it to make the Broiled French Toast recipe. My other current favorite cookbook is Melissa Clark’s Dinner, and I absolutely love the Spicy Beets recipe.
Thank you, Katie 🙂 🙂 🙂
My favorite cookbook is actually a few years old, but I just got around to reading it! It’s Ina Garten’s Cooking for Jeffry! I learned to cook and bake from my grandmother and Ina was her favorite so we always gave her the barefoot contessa cookbooks for gifts. I recently started to look through my grandma’s cookbook collection and this one was my favorite. Her devil’s food cake with mocha buttercream is delightful and my entire family requests it for celebrations!
Gosh! Not sure I can choose just one!! I use the most Go-to recipes from my three Fannie Farmer cookbooks. Pre-internet and when the kids were still at home, I needed reliable recipes I knew they would eat or I could prepare without a ton of fuss. Thanks for visiting with us through Margaret’s podcast. Mary
The Sweet Laurel Cookbook. Been wrestling with almond and coconut flour recipes for a change of pace. Still have a lot to learn! But my chocolate chip cookies from there disappeared in minutes. 🙂
I love Flour + Water’s pasta cookbook! My favorite is their basic egg pasta dough to make raviolis, tortellinis and any stuffed pasta. I really love when you are on A Way to Garden podcast, it brightened up my weekend and I can’t wait to check out the cookbooks you mentioned!
I am loving The Clever Cookbook by Emilie Raffa. All her recipes are healthy and unfussy. Right now I love making her Sheet Pan Fish & Chips. Her sourdough book is amazing too, I bake from it every week.
I’ve been using Midwest Made the most (relatively new). The chocolate chip cookie brittle in it is AMAZING. All of these cookbooks look amazing, too, and I already have 4 of the 5 sitting in my Amazon cart. 🙂 I love an old fashioned cookie so I’m excited to try out this one.
Hmm, there are so many new ones, but really my favorite is an old one. it’s the one I reach for again and again, the “How to cook everything” by Mark Bittman.
I love Sister Pie: The Recipes and Stories of a Big Hearted Bakery in Detroit. It’s the first time I’ve found a rhubarb pie recipe that really tastes spectacular. (and I grow my own rhubarb!)
The blueberry pie recipes are darn good too!
A good bake calls to my soul! I always wonder why my bakes aren’t quite photoready!
I just bought Bread Toast and Crumbs after following your blog and learning how to make sourdough bread. I would love any of these books to learn to bake. Can’t wait to make my first batch of peasant bread!
Thank you, Christine! 🙂 🙂 🙂
Im searching for baking inspiration…snacking cakes and 100 cookies look amazing for fast winter treats!
I am loving the Start Simple cookbook by Lukas Volger, particularly the Cheesy Cabbage and White Bean Soup.
I had so much fun reading the comments and writing down books and recipes I want to try! What’s Gaby Cooking, Eat What You Want got me thru the early pandemic months. I really liked the salmon coconut rice bowls. And recently Ina Gartens new book Modern Comfort food. The split pea soup was amazing! (Even though my brother said who needs a recipe for split pea soup?!)
I recently just got Matty Matheson’s cookbooks and I LOVE the Super Festival County Doughnut. Super fun and easy to make and it never lasts long in this household.
Can’t wait to get my Dessert Person book in the mail though.
Ottolenghi Flavor – the cacio e pepe with za’atar is now in our permanent rotation. So. Good. But honestly, all these books are calling my name.
Thank you for this opportunity! My favorite new cookbook is Local Dirt, by Andrea Bemis! I have been making her Honey Jalapeno Corn Bread to enjoy with all of my fall and early winter chili recipes – everything from the garden goes in there! And your Super Easy One-Pot Weeknight Chili is a great place to start – it gives us several healthy meals during the wild weekdays that seem to blur together this year.
Can’t wait to try these Brown Sugar Cookies!
I love the Zahav cookbook. It’s not a new cookbook, but I finally started trying recipes from it during quarantine. My favorite recipe from it so far is the pargiyot with onion marinade. It’s just skewered chicken thighs barbecued in a simple onion, garlic, lemon, and parsley marinate. It’s so good!
No time for cookbooks now but hope to get some of both with the Christmas holiday!
I recently added “The Rancho Gordo Vegetarian Kitchen” to my cookbook collection. My current favorite from the book is the roasted carrot, heirloom bean and farro salad. It’s perfect for this time of year and easy to pack up and share. I’ve been adding your candied pumpkin seeds and serving it with a multi-seeded version of your peasant bread. SO good!
The last cookbook I bought was the latest from Smitten Kitchen. Must admit I’m finding comfort in the “old friends” currently on my shelf but as the holidays approach I’m looking forward to some new recipes.
My favorite new (to me) cookbook is Melissa Guerra’s Texas Provincial Kitchen Cookbook. Her grapefruit pie is to die for! Fresh and a great mixture of sweet and tart. It’s a south Texas version of strawberry pie.
I have 3 of the books you recommended in my Amazon cart – I’m hoping after I read through them, they will work as Valentine’s for my budding chef grandchildren.
I loved this interview!
Of your featured books, my favorite (and the one I’ve put on my Wish List) is Snacking Cakes; the recipe in it that’s most calling my name is the Buckwheat Banana Cake. That book appeals to me because I’m totally burned out from all the cooking necessitated by the pandemic (I never realized how exhausting making three meals a day, seven days a week is, until I lost the option to get occasional take-out, rotisserie chickens, and restaurant meals), but I think I could deal with making simple one-bowl cakes. My current favorite of the cookbooks already on my bookshelf (haven’t bought a new cookbook in months, and this was my last thrift-store score before the pandemic) is More Baking with Schmecks Appeal by Edna Staebler. Her friendly, open approach to baking is just what I need right now, and her Buttermilk Coffee Cake is simple and good.
Angela Liddon’s Oh She Glows For Dinner is my newest and I love the Glowingly Spiced Red Lentil soup.
Thank you for such a great article. I have recently been indulging myself into baking different types of cookies. There’s definitely lots of failure but tons of Loaded fun and relaxation. I now have a book to look forward to!
My favourite cookbook is actually a handwritten cookbook my mom has made and left for me. It’s filled with all of my favourite dishes when I was young. Reminds me greatly of our past and the great times we had together. There is one recipe, potato with chicken wings, that I love. Not only does it taste great but I always smile when I remember how my mom used to yell at me for peeling the potatoes down to half the size. When I was little , I kept peeling because it’s get brown.
Thank you and happy holidays. Keep up the fantastic work!
The 100 Cookie cookbook because cookies are the best desert!