They say that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but Huckleberry: Stories, Secrets, and Recipes From Our Kitchen is certainly an exception to that rule. The book is beautiful to look at, with not only an eye-catching photo of a blueberry-stuffed brioche on its cover, but with a yellow and white polka dot pattern on the sides of the pages. The book contains a collection of recipes from the popular Huckleberry Cafe in Santa Monica, California, and allows you to recreate some of their most popular items at home without visiting Southern California yourself – and, if you’re an LA resident, without braving traffic.
The book is divided into chapters by category and by time, meaning that you can get a good idea of what the production schedule inside a professional bakery’s kitchen looks like just by reading the table of contents. Muffins are up first and savory sandwiches and egg-based brunch items are in the last chapter. The book includes recipes for quick breads, tea cakes, scones, yeast breads and a wide variety of pastries, as well as donuts, fruit crumbles, pancakes and cereals. Not every recipe is a breakfast dish per-se, but there isn’t a single recipe that won’t make your next brunch more impressive. The recipes are clearly written and easy to follow, with a bit more emphasis on whole grain recipes (and blends of flour that combine all purpose with almond, rice and other flours) than you’ll find in some other books.
Worth noting is that there are a few typos in some of the recipes in the book (it happens to the best of us, really), and of the recipes with errors happens to be the cover recipe. Fortunately, corrections are available online and even noted in the reviews on Amazon.  It is worth taking a quick look in case the recipe that catches your eye is one with a slight mistake that could throw off your finished product. By and large, the recipe should turn out to be consistent and delicious, just as the beautiful photos that are found throughout the book promise.
What do you think?