Photographs are always a great thing to include in cookbooks. Not only are food photos fun to look at when you’re flipping through the pages, but they’re helpful when putting together recipes so you know how each of the components of a dessert should look. Most cookbooks don’t show you the steps in between the dry ingredients and the finished product, but Illustrated Step-by-Step Baking does and that will make this book appealing both to new bakers who want some guidance when working through a recipe and experienced bakers who like to see a lot of visuals when they work.
Every single recipe in this book is illustrated with step-by-step photos that show every piece of the process in mixing that dough or constructing that layer cake. The photos are, of course, accompanied by the written instructions for the recipes, but they capture a lot of detail and are really going to help anyone who prefers visual learning as opposed to just reading a recipe. In fact, the photos can actually be inspiring because they are very straightforward in how they present the food and that makes the process look easy and accessible, even for a recipe with multiple steps. The recipes include all kinds of cakes, cookies, mousses, pies, tarts and breads.
This book gives the weights for all of the recipes and you will get the best results if you weigh your ingredients. It’s a good excuse to buy and start using a kitchen scale, if you don’t already have one, because recipes become almost foolproof when you weigh them out, as the guesswork of “did I pack enough sugar in there” is eliminated. The photos of the finished dishes in the book are enticing and this book is large enough that you won’t run out of recipes you want to make for a very long time.
What do you think?