Product Description

Caprial Pence has teamed up with Melissa Carey, her pastry chef at Caprial’s Bistro, to create another fantastic cookbook, this one entirely devoted to desserts! In preparing the collection, Caprial and Melissa poured through their recipe files, winnowing them down to 50 core recipes, each grounded in the chefs’ shared appreciation of wholesome, comforting, no-nonsense desserts that beg to be made time and again. The result is a deeply satisfying, truly essential collection of classic and contemporary recipes for cakes, pies, and tarts; custards and puddings; ice creams and sorbets; and cookies and special-occasion desserts. Like a culinary school class, CAPRIAL’S DESSERTS focuses on the basic process pastry chefs practice daily—using master recipes and techniques as a springboard for developing creative new desserts. Building on the 50 master recipes, each chapter reveals how they can be finessed to create one exciting variation after another. Along the way, clear step-by-step photographs put you alongside Caprial and Melissa in their kitchen as they share their secrets for making extraordinary pie dough, working wonders with an ice cream machine, perfecting the delicate art of puff pastry, and numerous other essentials of the sweet kitchen. If you are new to baking, this book will give you the confidence, inspiration, and skills to build a solid dessert repertoire; if you are an experienced baker, it will help you hone classic techniques and push you to new levels of creativity and improvisation in the kitchen. A model of beauty and clarity, CAPRIAL’S DESSERTS is destined to become a well-thumbed, and flour-caked fixture on your kitchen bookshelf.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1049564 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-01
• Released on: 2004-08-01
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 9.01" h x .76" w x 9.03" l, 2.13 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From Amazon.com
Caprial Pence (of Caprial's Bistro in Portland, Oregon) and her pastry chef, Melissa Carey, go for "flavor and substance" in Caprial's Desserts, a volume of master recipes and variations for the desserts that keep her Bistro customers coming back for more. These are simple desserts that don't need translation. They are mostly old-fashioned, the kind you wish your grandmother passed on to you, such as the rich and moist Chocolate Buttermilk Cake. And to ice it, her Chocolate Sour Cream Frosting is the recipe you've been looking for. Master recipes are followed by variations just to get you started. Caprial encourages us to experiment with whatever we have on hand. Their recipe for a truly crispy Fruit Crisp is followed by variations for Oatmeal-Nut Crisp and for Individual Fruit Crisps. Once we understand which parts of the recipes are safe to change, the sky's the limit. Banana Cream Pie, Caramel-Pear Tart with a Graham Shortbread Crust, Jenny's Great-Grandma's Gingersnaps, and Peach-Raspberry Scones are comfort food epitomized. Orange-Caramel Pull-Apart Bread, Chocolate Bread Pudding, Strawberry-Mascarpone Ice Cream, and Coconut Cream Cake will impress your friends and thrill your kids. These recipes are creative enough for anyone to appreciate, and are so clear, concise (most take up less than a page), and easy to follow that even pastry novices will feel comfortable diving in. --Leora Y. Bloom

From Library Journal
Co-owner of Caprial's Bistro in Portland, OR, and host of an ongoing PBS series, Pence is also the author of several other cookbooks. This time, she collaborated with her pastry chef, Carey, to present 50 "master recipes" and dozens of variations that build on them. For example, Flourless Chocolate Cake inspired Individual Chocolate-Raspberry Cakes and two other spin-offs; Fig and Hazelnut Caramel Tart is a sophisticated variation on luscious Caramel-Walnut Tart. There are color photographs of many of the desserts and step-by-step shots of various techniques. For most baking collections. Yan, Martin. Martin Yan's Asian Favorites: From Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Thailand.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
CAPRIAL PENCE is the executive chef and proprietor of Caprial’s Bistro in Portland, Oregon, where she has earned such accolades as Best Chef: Pacific Northwest from the James Beard Foundation. Caprial’s cooking show can be seen on public television nationwide. MELISSA CAREY has created scrumptious desserts as the pasty chef at Caprial’s Bistro for the past three years.