This book is fantastic. It’s like a patisserie course between covers, available for you to follow at your own pace. It begins with Baker Buddy Valastro reminiscing about his childhood in the kitchen, the bakery where he grew up and learned all the tools of the trade. He goes on to discuss kitchen tools and ingredients, providing reasons why, for example, it’s worth buying cake flour instead of just using all-purpose, or what a well-stocked kitchen will contain.

The recipe portion begins with cookies, goes on to pies and tarts, and ends up with cakes. This isn’t necessarily the order a beginning cook should follow, but it does make for an easy thematic arrangement. Each recipe is fully explained and often illustrated with step-by-step instructions, especially if it’s at all complicated. You’ll learn how to deal with fondant, pipe filigree designs, make edible animals to decorate a zoo-themed cake, and much much more. By the time you’ve completed any recipe, you’ll feel you took a class on it; and you’ll be amazed at your prowess. The instructions are so thorough that it takes away any fear.

Baking with the Cake Boss: 100 of Buddy’s Best Recipes and Decorating Secrets is a gorgeous book. It would make a fantastic last-minute gift for anyone who’s interested in learning more about baking, and since baking benefits everyone around you, it’s easily justifiable as a gift for yourself.

Elizabeth loves baking and has the figure to prove it! Read more at her blog Planet Nomad.

This is a nice big book full of recipes in three sections: drop cookies, bar cookies, formed and filled cookies.

Read my full review today at 5 Minutes for Mom, where I share several gift ideas for this useful and yummy collection!

Comments are closed here, to encourage you to comment over there so that you can enter to win your own copy.

Jennifer Donovan has always loved baking with her kids, and long before that, she developed a healthy (or unhealthy!) appreciation of baked goods. She blogs at Snapshot.

Season to Taste: How I Lost My Sense of Smell and Found My Way is Birnbaum’s memoir detailing her struggle to come to terms with her new condition as an anosmic – one who has lost their sense of smell due to illness, blockages or head injury. She was told her ability to smell would likely never return.

Birnbaum was able to taste the basics – sour, sweet, salty and bitter, but could not distinguish any other nuances of food. “Ice cream was a thick and cold slush. Lattes were hot, sometimes even gelatinous liquid. I ate yogurt for its smooth chill and bread soaked in Tabasco sauce because I could feel the spiciness.” Despite what she had been told by the experts, her ability to smell returned slowly, each new aroma arriving with a bang. Soon she could detect all sorts of smells, but found she couldn’t identify the source.

Season to Taste includes information about the science of smell, a la Mary Roach — though without her wit and extensive footnotes — mixed in with details of Birnbaum’s recovery. She describes how scent molecules enter the nose and travel to the brain; how and why smell is linked to memory and emotion.

Birnbaum recounts her quest to find out more about smell. She visited Taste and Smell clinics, both as a patient and observing others; spent the day with a flavorist who uses chemicals to create the flavors in packaged foods; took classes in France to learn how to enhance her sense of smell. It was while in France she learned to use triggers to recognize scents she could smell but not name.

She slowly returned to cooking, starting with baking as it requires exact measurements and doesn’t need to be tasted along the way. As new smells returned she delved into cooking savory dishes, some more successfully than others. But Birnbaum ultimately chose a career as a journalist, perhaps an unexpected path in her life, but one that forecasts an auspicious future.

If you enjoy memoirs that include food and science, along with a journey of ups and downs, then Season to Taste is right up your alley.

Nancy has never given the sense of smell much thought before, but finds it fascinating. She can be found blogging at Life With My Boys and Books.

Drs. Les and Leslie Parrott experience the same evening rush as the rest of us. For a while, Leslie served as a short-order cook in her own kitchen as she prepared separate items for different family members before shuttling them to various activities (sound familiar?). As a psychologist and family therapist, however, their research (and the research of countless others) has shown that families that share a dinnertime ritual with each other reap the rewards. In The Hour that Matters Most: The Surprising Power of the Family Meal the Parrotts discuss the secrets of a happy home and explain why the family meal plays such an important role.

While the research encourages us to gather around the table, the question exists: How will I do it? After establishing the need for the family meal, the Parrotts include informative chapters on food preparation, talking with your family, listening to your children, curbing conflict, enjoying laughter, and other topics. The Parrotts also include recipes and advice from Stephanie Allen and Tina Kuna, two leaders in the meal-assembly industry. This book is a practical and useful tool to help jump start a meaningful tradition. I especially appreciated the assurance that not every dinner hour is magic. Food may be burned, kids may be cranky, and parents may be impatient, but the Parrotts encourage persistence. Over time, family meals create stability and meaningful relationships between parents and their children. The Parrotts assure us that time together at the dinner table softens hearts, builds connections, engenders laughter, and cultivates caring.

According to the Parrotts, “Countless studies have shown that if parents could take only one proactive and practical step to engender family commitment, appreciation, affection, positive communication, time together, and all the rest, it would be to establish a regular dinnertime around a common table without distraction. One hour a few times a week. That’s it.” I’m a realist, and I know we will not be able to have a family meal every night. But thanks to the information and ideas in The Hour that Matters Most, I am committed to bringing my family back to the table. I am sure I am not the only reader to be facing this challenge, and I encourage you to pick up a copy of this book. Our families are worth it!

5 Minutes for Mom has 12 copies to give away!

I’d love to hear your thoughts here on my review, but to enter to win a copy, you need to visit the main post at 5 Minutes for Mom and leave a comment over there. The giveaway closes October 13.

Lauren is a wife, mother-of-two, and an avid reader. She blogs at Baseballs and Bows.

I missed salad dressing. The only kind you could buy was a vinaigrette, and it wasn’t even a good one—full of preservatives and with a weird gunky texture. I had to make my own. Now I’m to the point where I don’t even need to measure—I can whip out a vinaigrette in no time flat, using whatever variety of vinegar or lemon juice, adding herbs or garlic or sometimes even sugar and mustard for a spicy-sweet version that’s really good on spinach. When we moved back last year, I was looking forward to buying salad dressings again, but I was sorely disappointed. Bottled salad dressings kind of suck. They don’t taste good to me anymore. I find myself, here in the Land of an Entire Aisle of Salad Dressings, continuing to drizzle olive oil and add a few splashes of lemon juice and a few shakes of salt and pepper.

Please read my full review of the very enjoyable Kitchen Counter Cooking School over at 5 Minutes for Mom today. You must leave a comment over there to enter to win.

Elizabeth loves to cook and you can kind of tell just by looking at her. She is raising kids who are fearless in the kitchen, and leave messes to prove it. Read more at her blog Planet Nomad.

If your school hasn’t caught on to benefits of a healthy lunch, then Amy Kalafa’s Lunch Wars: How to Start a School Food Revolution and Win the Battle for Our Children’s Health is the book for you. Kalafa is the award-winning documentary filmmaker who created the film “Two Angry Moms,” chronicling the efforts of Dr. Susan Rubin and her Better School Food movement to bring wholesome, healthy food back into our schools. Click over to the Kirkus Reviews Blog for my review of Lunch Wars, which gives parents the tools needed to start their own school food revolution.

We’d love for you to leave a comment on that post and join in the conversation!

Nancy thinks school lunch food has come a long way since the days of pizza bagels and Sloppy Joe’s. She writes about her 2 boys, books and life in Colorado at Life With My Boys and Books.

So I wasn’t surprised when I picked up a copy of Lauren Shockey’s memoir Four Kitchens: Life Behind the Burner in New York, Hanoi, Tel Aviv and Paris, which follows her work in restaurant kitchens on 4 continents. It makes sense to me that a young American chef would want to learn how to cook food from around the world.

This fascinating memoir not only follows Shockey in her journeys, it also serves as a mini-cookbook. Shockey ends each chapter with a selection of recipes incorporating different things she’s learned, from molecular gastronomy in New York’s famed wd-50 restaurant, to French-infused cooking in Vietnam and more.

To read more of my review, please click over to the Kirkus Reviews Blog. Leave a comment there–I’d love to hear your thoughts.

We are proud to be a part of the Kirkus Bloggers Network. You can subscribe to the Kirkus Book Blogger Network feed. Go to the home page, and then click the subscribe button to get the feed in your favorite feed reader.

Elizabeth loves to travel and she loves to eat, so this book was a gastronomical delight. She often talks about food on her blog Planet Nomad.

Sandra Beasley doesn’t have it so lucky. From birth she refused to breastfeed, formula caused internal bleeding and standard alternatives such as goat’s milk and soy milk wreaked havoc on her system. Beasley is allergic to dairy, egg, soy, beef, shrimp, pine nuts, cucumbers, cantaloupe, honeydew, mango, macadamias, pistachios, cashews, swordfish and mustard, in addition to several environmental allergies. Interestingly, she is not allergic to gluten or peanuts, which are some of the most talked about food allergies. The title, Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, is borne of her birthday parties as a child where everyone in attendance — except the birthday girl — could eat the birthday cake, but then could not come anywhere near her without contaminating her. Even a kiss on the cheek by someone who had eaten the frosting would result in a lip-shaped rash.

Part memoir, part cautionary tale on how not to raise an allergic child, Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl is wry without being scathing. Beasley compares the world we live in today, where food allergies are much more prevalent and schools have several page-long action plans in case of a reaction, to her childhood in the 80s where making allowances meant giving her the first lunch period and bringing in “Sandra-friendly” snacks when the other kids were getting cupcakes. She credits her mom for getting her through her childhood and references several times she camped out in the ER waiting room waiting for either the Benadryl or the anaphylaxis to kick in.

Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl explores some of the science of food allergies – what causes an allergic reaction, the difference between an intolerance and an allergy, how allergy tests work and why they aren’t so reliable, current research into treating allergies. Beasley maintains that not much time or money is being spent on researching the reasons behind the recent surge in allergies because the real benefit (and profit) is in treatment. She is an advocate for food allergy issues and Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl is an educational and fascinating look at life with allergies.

Nancy considers herself lucky that neither she nor her kiddos have food allergies. She writes about her boys, books and life in Colorado at Life With My Boys and Books.