Most baking can be divided into two categories: everyday baking and occasion baking. Everyday baking includes the cookies and brownies that you might make on a lazy Sunday afternoon to snack on during the week. Occasion baking includes the layer cakes and other goodies that you might create for holidays and birthdays. I don’t think that you need to wait for an occasion to start baking, but every occasion is a good excuse to preheat your oven. In Baked Occasions, you’ll find dozens of recipes that will help you celebrate all kinds of occasions throughout the year in delicious style.
The desserts in this book have creative names that will make you want to give them a try even before you start reading through the ingredients. For instance, New Year’s Day’s Hair of the Dog Cake or Easter’s Meat & Cheese Utopia will start to tempt you on the table of contents page. The book is divided up into chapters by month, with recipes for various holidays – some more well-known than others, but all worth celebrating – that occur within that month listed. The recipes are not your average baked good recipes because they are designed to be for occasions. This means that they try to pack in more flavor than your average batch of chocolate chip cookies and that they might take a bit more effort to make from start to finish. That said, the recipes are written in a very clear, friendly manner than is easy to follow and the decorations are kept sweet and simple, with all the work going into developing the flavor of the recipes.
Not every single holiday that is in your calendar will be included in the book, but there are more than enough to cover your holiday baking needs for all the major holidays during the year. The less well-known holidays that are included will give you the opportunity to bake something a little different and celebrate something out-of-the-ordinary, such as National Wine Day or Eleanor Roosevelt’s Birthday. There are plenty of photos illustrating the recipes that will get your mouth watering and will put you in a baking mood.
What do you think?