The key to being a good baker is choosing good recipes. Yes, it’s important to carefully follow the directions and to buy the right ingredients, but the real secret to successful baking is finding recipes that are guaranteed to turn out cookies, cakes, pies, and dinner rolls that not only taste much better than anything you could pick up from the store, but also make you smile involuntarily and maybe even bop up and down a little.
At Food52, we believe that no matter how busy you are, how much you hate messes, and how strongly you believe in your inability to follow a recipe, you don’t need to outsource baking to the professionals. Anyone can have fresh biscuits in the morning and homemade brown sugar shortbread to snack on in the afternoon, and it needn’t require huge amounts of time or energy. It’s about finding reliable, no-fail recipes, baking them often, and, along the way, learning a handful of useful tips that will make you a better baker.
In this book, you’ll find the kind of recipes that you know will provide delicious results without occupying your entire day, that you can make on a weeknight and enjoy for days after, and that are more fun than stressful and more satisfying than frustrating. These recipes come from old neighborhood cookbooks, from scribbled recipe cards stored in grandparents’ kitchens, from bake sales of years past, and from friends whose desserts were the stars of every potluck. And since these recipes live in so many places, we use our website to collect and preserve the cookies and the cakes, the biscuits and the breads that have lived long, happy lives in kitchens just like yours.
In order to whittle down the huge assortment of outstanding recipes on our site to find the most beloved (and least fussy), we polled our staff and our trusted community members and, like always, they delivered. The sixty recipes we ended up with are all gems; each one had the Food52 editors speaking a little too loudly, trying to share stories of the first time we had tasted the Cardamom Currant Snickerdoodles or made the Cheese Crispettes. This collection spans regions and time periods: “Cuppa Cuppa Sticka” Peach and Blueberry Cobbler—named for the quantities of milk, sugar, and butter—from Gaffney, South Carolina; lemon custard unearthed in an old recipe box in an aunt’s house in Virginia; Overnight Orange Refrigerator Rolls from Alabama; the chocolate cake Amanda ate for every birthday celebration growing up; mandelbrot studded with dark chocolate and dried cherries from North Dakota; and coconut-pecan bars that associate editor Sarah Jampel’s grandma discovered in a cooking class on Long Island in the 1960s.
But despite the diversity of recipes in this book, they’re all part of the same family. Turn to these easy-going standbys when it’s Monday evening and you have little time or patience to fuss over buttercream, but also when you’re in need of a dinner party dessert to surprise and impress guests. These recipes won’t ask you to devote hours to baking, but they’ll deliver the same satisfaction as if they had taken all day. Some, like the baked French toast, can be made ahead of time; others, like the Yogurt Biscuits, require no planning at all; and many, like the Brown Butter Cupcake Brownies, are perfect for baking on a rainy day and storing in the freezer for when you’re in need of spontaneous chocolate.
Don’t look here for yet another chocolate chip cookie recipe—but we’re betting the Grape-Nut and Chocolate Chip Kitchen Sink Oatmeal Cookies will become a new favorite. And while you might have eaten tres leches at a restaurant, we think that the coconut version will be more interesting than anything you’ve tasted before (and best of all, you’ll learn how simple it is to make this cake at home). Many of these recipes make use of a wide range of ingredients—like coconut oil, rye flour, black sesame seeds, and coconut milk—that add new dimensions of flavor and texture to baking yet are not difficult to find. Others—like the Honey Pecan Cake or the Six-Ingredient Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich Cookies—make use of pantry staples you already have on hand. And none of them will have you furrowing your brow over where to find acetate cake wrappers or how to fold puff pastry dough.
We hope this book empowers you to make your own whole wheat dinner rolls and to turn summer fruit into a jammy, flaky galette. When you slice into your homemade pizza dough for the first time, you’ll find that the results are tastier and more satisfying than anything you could buy from the grocery store. Plus, you’ll have the pleasure of knowing you made it yourself. Go ahead and dog-ear the pages. Splatter them with milk, sprinkle them with flour, and cover them with your own notes. Make a pile of cookies and feed them to your friends and family—just be prepared to share the recipes.