72 reference recipes behind the work
Every piece in the collection is paired with a full recipe: ingredients by weight, a step-by-step method and chef’s notes, compiled from the published methods of the most trusted pastry chefs and bakers. Where the experts disagree, the two most debated methods are set side by side.
Viennoiserie
Classic Butter Croissants
The croissant is a yeasted, laminated dough: a lean, lightly sweet base folded around a sheet of butter until it holds dozens of alternating layers.
Danish Pastry with Cream Cheese and Fruit
Danish dough is laminated like croissant dough but enriched with egg and more sugar, which makes it softer, richer and more cake-like.
Galette des Rois
The galette des rois, or kings' cake, is the puff pastry and almond cream cake eaten across northern France for Epiphany on January 6 and throughout the month.
Pecan Sticky Buns
Sticky buns are spiral rolls baked on a layer of caramel and nuts, then turned out so the topping runs down the sides.
Rough Puff Pastry
Rough puff, called feuilletage rapide or demi-feuilletage in French kitchens, is the quick version of puff pastry.
Soft Cinnamon Rolls
Cinnamon rolls are a soft enriched dough spread with butter, sugar and cinnamon, rolled into a spiral and baked side by side so they stay tender.
Bread
Basic White Sandwich Loaf
This is the plain pan loaf of American and British home baking: a lightly enriched dough with a little milk, butter and sugar for a soft crumb and a thin golden crust.
Braided Challah
Challah is the braided egg bread of the Jewish Sabbath and holidays.
Brioche: Loaf and Braided Buns
Brioche is the richest of the classic French yeast doughs, made with eggs in place of most of the water and with butter worked in at up to half the weight of the flour.
Ciabatta
Ciabatta, Italian for slipper, is a flat, flour-dusted loaf with a thin crisp crust and a wide open, glossy crumb.
Classic Baguettes
The baguette is the long, crisp loaf of Paris, made from nothing but flour, water, salt and yeast.
Country Sourdough Loaf
A naturally leavened country loaf with a dark, blistered crust and an open, glossy crumb.
Cream Scones with Lemon Poppy Seed Variation
Scones began in Scotland as a griddle-baked quick bread, first recorded in the early 1500s, and became an oven-baked teatime staple once baking powder arrived in the mid-19th century.
Pain de Mie (Pullman Loaf)
Pain de mie is the French sandwich loaf, named for its mie, the soft crumb.
Shokupan (Japanese Milk Bread)
Shokupan is Japan's everyday white loaf: tall, feathery, faintly sweet, and able to be pulled apart in soft strands.
Soft Butter Dinner Rolls
These are classic American pull-apart rolls: a soft dough enriched with milk, butter, egg and a little sugar, baked close together so the sides stay tender.
Tarts
Fresh Fruit Tart
The classic French tarte aux fruits: a crisp sweet pastry shell filled with vanilla pastry cream and covered in glazed fresh fruit.
Glazed Raspberry Chocolate Tart
A modern pâtisserie tart built on one of the classic flavour pairings: bittersweet chocolate and raspberry.
Hokkaido Baked Cheese Tarts
These small tarts pair a crisp butter cookie shell with a mousse-like cheese filling that is baked briefly at high heat so the top browns while the centre stays soft and creamy.
Lemon Meringue Tart
Tarte au citron meringuée pairs a sharp lemon filling with a cloud of soft, toasted meringue in a crisp sweet shell.
Passion Fruit and White Chocolate Tart
A contemporary French-style tart that sets the sharp, tropical acidity of passion fruit curd against a soft white chocolate mousse.
Raspberry Tart
Tarte aux framboises is one of the simplest and most loved French fruit tarts: a sweet pastry shell, a creamy base and tightly packed fresh raspberries.
S'mores Tart
The campfire sandwich of graham cracker, chocolate and toasted marshmallow, rebuilt as a tart.
Swiss Meringue
Swiss meringue is made by warming egg whites and sugar together over simmering water until the sugar dissolves, then whipping the mixture to a dense, glossy foam.
Tarte au Citron
The French lemon tart is a thin sweet pastry shell filled with an intensely sharp, silky lemon cream.
Vanilla Custard Tart (Flan Pâtissier)
Flan pâtissier, also called flan parisien, is the tall baked custard tart sold by the slice in bakeries all over France.
Cakes & Entremets
Buttermilk Peach Coffee Cake with Streusel
American coffee cake descends from the yeasted and crumb-topped kuchen that German and Scandinavian immigrants brought with them in the nineteenth century.
Bûche de Noël (Chocolate Yule Log)
The bûche de Noël is the French Christmas cake, a rolled sponge shaped and frosted to look like the log once burned on the hearth through the holiday.
Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting
Carrots have sweetened European puddings and cakes since the Middle Ages, and carrot cakes were baked in Britain under sugar rationing during the Second World War.
Chocolate Angel Food Cake with Chocolate-Dipped Strawberries
Angel food cake is an American creation of the late nineteenth century, made with whipped egg whites and no fat at all.
Chocolate Mousse Cake with Raspberry Filling
A ring-molded mousse cake is the workhorse of the French pastry shop: a sponge base, a bright fruit layer and a tall band of chocolate mousse set without baking.
Chocolate and Vanilla Bavarian Slice
Bavarian cream, or bavarois, is a vanilla custard set with gelatin and lightened with whipped cream, a staple of French pastry since the early nineteenth century and closely associated with Antonin Carême.
Classic Chiffon Cake
Chiffon cake was invented in Los Angeles in 1927 by Harry Baker, an insurance salesman turned caterer who kept his method secret for two decades.
Dark Chocolate Mousse Cake with Glaçage and Chocolate Décor
This is the classic French chocolate entremet: a thin chocolate sponge, a deep layer of dark chocolate mousse, and a coat of black cocoa glaçage miroir.
Flourless Chocolate Cake with Chocolate Mousse
Flourless chocolate cake relies on nothing but chocolate, butter, eggs and sugar, so it is naturally gluten free.
Gâteau Opéra
The opéra is a low, precise Parisian cake of almond joconde sponge soaked in coffee syrup, layered with coffee buttercream and chocolate ganache and sealed with a thin chocolate glaze.
Gâteau Saint-Honoré
The Saint-Honoré is a showpiece of French pâtisserie: a pastry base ringed with choux, crowned with caramel-dipped cream puffs, and filled with piped cream.
Hot Milk Sponge Cake
Hot milk sponge is an old-fashioned American cake that turns up in community cookbooks and newspaper columns from the early twentieth century onward.
Lemon Chiffon Roll
A chiffon sheet is the most forgiving sponge to roll, because the oil and added liquid keep it soft and bendable even when cold.
Mirror Glaze Entremet
The modern entremet is a French mousse cake built upside down in a mold, frozen solid, then coated in a glaze so glossy it reflects the room.
New York Cheesecake
New York cheesecake is tall, dense and rich, built almost entirely on cream cheese, which was first produced in New York State in the 1870s.
Pumpkin Roll with Cream Cheese Filling
The pumpkin roll is an American holiday standard: a thin spiced pumpkin sponge rolled around tangy cream cheese filling.
Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte (Black Forest Cake)
Germany's most famous cake layers chocolate sponge with sour cherries, whipped cream and a generous dose of Kirschwasser, the clear cherry brandy distilled in the Black Forest region.
Swiss Meringue Buttercream
Swiss meringue buttercream is made by warming egg whites and sugar together over hot water, whipping them into a stable meringue and beating in soft butter.
Petits Gâteaux & Plated
Baked Alaska
Baked Alaska hides ice cream on a sponge base under a thick coat of meringue, which is browned quickly while the centre stays frozen.
Chocolate Ganache Tartlets
Petite chocolate tartlets in the style of a French pâtisserie case: a thin chocolate sablé shell filled with dark ganache, crowned with a moulded ganache dome, ringed with piped cream and finished with a touch of gold leaf.
Crème Brûlée
Crème brûlée is a baked custard of cream, egg yolks, sugar and vanilla under a thin sheet of caramelised sugar that shatters at the tap of a spoon.
Mille-Feuille with Lemon Cream Variation
Mille-feuille, a thousand leaves, is three layers of crisp caramelised puff pastry stacked with pastry cream.
Three-Layer Mousse Verrines
Verrine comes from the French verre, glass, and describes a dessert layered in a small clear cup so the colors show from the side.
Cookies & Bars
Blueberry Crumb Bars
Crumb bars are a simple American bar cookie in which one buttery dough does two jobs, pressed into the pan as a base and scattered over the fruit as a streusel top.
Brown Butter Financiers
Financiers are small French almond cakes made with egg whites and browned butter.
Cream Cheese Rugelach
Rugelach are small rolled pastries from the Ashkenazi Jewish kitchens of Central and Eastern Europe, where the dough was traditionally made with yeast or sour cream.
Gluten-Free Muffins with a Coarse Sugar Top
The American muffin is a quick bread raised with baking powder rather than yeast, a style that took hold in the 19th century once chemical leaveners became available.
Homemade Honey Graham Crackers
The graham cracker is named for Sylvester Graham, a 19th-century American minister and diet reformer who promoted coarsely ground whole wheat flour.
Lemon Bars
Lemon bars are an American bake-sale classic: a buttery shortbread base under a sharp, soft-set lemon custard, dusted with powdered sugar.
No-Spread Cut-Out and Embossed Sugar Cookies
Rolled sugar cookies in America are commonly traced to the German Protestant settlers of Nazareth, Pennsylvania, in the 1700s, and pressing a pattern into cookie dough goes back further still to European molded cookies such as springerle and speculaas.
Pinwheel and Checkerboard Icebox Cookies
Icebox cookies are slice-and-bake cookies: the dough is shaped into a log, chilled until firm, then cut into rounds or squares.
Rested Chocolate Chip Cookies
The chocolate chip cookie was created by Ruth Wakefield at the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, in the 1930s.
Thin Crisp Wafer Cookies
In American baking a wafer is a very thin, snappy slice-and-bake cookie, the style made familiar by the packaged chocolate wafers that appeared in the 1920s and became the basis of the icebox cake.
Pies
Apple Hand Pies
Hand pies are small, sealed turnovers made to be eaten without a plate, a tradition that runs from British pasties to the fried pies of the American South.
Chocolate Cream Pie
An American diner classic: a crisp, fully baked pie shell filled with stovetop chocolate custard and covered in whipped cream.
French Apple Tart (Tarte aux Pommes)
The open-faced French apple tart shows its fruit: paper-thin apple slices are fanned in overlapping circles over a buttery crust and glazed with apricot.
Glazed Fresh Strawberry Pie
A fresh strawberry pie leaves most of the fruit raw.
Lattice-Top Blackberry Pie
A double-crust fruit pie is one of the oldest forms of American baking, and blackberry is among the most traditional fillings, made every summer wherever the brambles grow wild.
Chocolate & Confections
Cooked Sugar Stages and Butter Toffee
All sugar confectionery rests on one fact: as a syrup boils, water leaves, the temperature rises and the cooled result gets steadily harder, from a soft ball to brittle glass.
Layered Chocolate Mint Bars with Silver Leaf
Three-layer chocolate mint bars, a thin brownie under a peppermint cream and a dark chocolate glaze, are a long-standing American bake sale and holiday classic.
Small Batch Bean-to-Bar Dark Chocolate
Cacao has been roasted and ground on stone in Mesoamerica for thousands of years, and smooth eating chocolate only became possible after Rodolphe Lindt developed the conche in 1879.
Tempered Dark Chocolate, Molded and Gilded
Cocoa butter can set in six different crystal forms, and only one of them, known as Form V, gives chocolate its gloss, clean snap and resistance to melting in the hand.
Kitchen Notes
From the Journal
American Pan Pizza Dough
American pan pizza is baked in an oiled, straight-sided pan, so the base fries crisp while the inside stays light and airy, with cheese caramelised against the edges.
Flaky Butter Biscuits
The American biscuit is a quick bread of the South, raised with chemical leavening and layered with cold fat.
Choux Pastry: Cream Puffs and Éclairs
Pâte à choux is a twice-cooked paste of water, butter, flour and eggs that puffs on steam alone into a crisp, hollow shell.