The Cake Bible, 35th Anniversary Edition

Book excerpt: The legendary IACP Culinary Classic The Cake Bible—found in the kitchen of every serious baker and beloved for decades—with classic recipes thoroughly updated and including about 30% new recipes and methods and the latest ingredient and equipment information The original Cake Bible is a guiding light in the world’s baking literature, with Rose Levy Beranbaum’s deep knowledge and respect for craft to be found on every page. It’s for home and professional bakers who want to make glorious, technically perfect cakes and understand why the ingredients in cakes work the way they do. The book was hugely influential from the moment it first came out in 1988, selling hundreds of thousands of copies and going through sixty printings. It introduced the reverse creaming method, incorporating flour and butter first instead of butter and sugar. This makes mixing faster and easier, helps cakes rise more evenly, and results in a finer and more tender cake texture. And it’s among the first United States cookbooks to offer measurements in weights, highlighting the superiority of the metric system, which has become the gold standard in baking books. But a lot has changed in thirty-five years—and The Cake Bible has changed with it! This striking new edition—with new photographs in an expanded section--contains recipes for classic and innovative cakes and complementary adornments of all types, instructions for making stunning decorations, and flavor variations for every craving and occasion, with foundational recipes like All-Occasion Downy Yellow Butter Cake and Angel Food Cake and showstoppers like the Strawberry Maria, which brings together Génoise au Chocolat, Grand Marnier-flavored syrup, and Strawberry Cloud Cream. Rose also provides instructions for baking for special occasions, such as weddings, with recipes to serve 150 people as well as formulas to scale the recipes for any number of desired servings. For thirty-five years, Rose has been tweaking and reworking her methods based on reader feedback and constant conversations with other bakers and food and equipment professionals. Rose’s fans, professional and amateur alike, will love this perfect distillation of her decades of experience and the pure joy of creation.