Author Archives: lisa
ChocolateChocolate Tracker: A best-baked favorite from ChocolateChocolate continues to be the Chocolate Chip Crumb Buns (page 213, and following pages). A chocolate chip yeast dough is spiraled around a chocolate chip cream filling and, once cut into individual buns and panned, generously topped topped with chocolate chip streusel, and baked.
Baking by Flavor Tracker: Still the all-time, must-bake recipe from Baking by Flavor, my Kitchen Sink Buttercrunch Bars, leads the pack for chewy, caramelly, buttercrunch candy-smacked bar cookies. Oh my. The praise continues (for such an easy recipe, I admit).
Baking Style Tracker: My answer to readers asking me to choose a favorite chocolate cookie from Baking Style: Art, Craft, Recipes? The recipe for when chocolate chip cookies go butterscotch (page 475). These are buttery and caramelly, with lots of chips.
Many readers have asked about the design details for Baking Style. This query was presented to my publisher (Natalie Chapman) and editor (Pamela Chirls) for commenting on the particulars. Please welcome both experts.
From Natalie Chapman: “Baking Style is a voluptuous book. The design is elegant, distinctive, stylish, and very pink. Curlicued rules and candy-stripes on the edges of text pages accentuate the allure of the recipes and photographs while complementing the cleanness of the design. The splendid full-page photographs show Lisa’s cookies, cakes, breads, muffins, and other baked creations aglow against a variety of pink and patterned backgrounds, and the endpapers dazzle the reader with eighty thumbnail-sized photographs of baking-related equipment and ingredients. The abundance of the interior is perfectly contained within a cover that’s at once understated and sensual. Unjacketed, printed on linen-textured material, the cover makes use of the same cursive but clean lines in the interior and adds some shimmer with silver metallic ink. The background color is, of course, a deep, almost shocking, pink. The overall effect is at once substantial and intimate, as only a printed book can be.” From Pam Chirls: “From pink to purple, a rich range of textures and tones became the showcase for Lisa Yockelson’s collection of cakes, cookies, and breads in Baking Style. Along with 80 four-color photographs of ingredients and equipment from Lisa’s pantry and cupboards printed on the book’s endpapers, the cover was designed to make a quiet statement of elegance, borrowing the fuchsia color, the graphic pattern, and the strong typography from the interior. The title is part of a creative seal, promising a personal baking journey for the reader.”
ChocolateChocolate Tracker: My Coca-Cola Cake (page 285, and following page) with its Coca-Cola Frosting (page 286) is a well-baked treat from my sweet ChocolateChocolate. The cake is exceptionally moist, bakes up easily, and feeds a sweet-loving crowd.
You baked all the recipes for photography in Baking Style and, as such, can you tell us what was the hardest recipe to style?
Though the process of styling baked goods for photography began to flourish in earnest for me with Baking by Flavor, and continued on with ChocolateChocolate, and Baking Style: Art, Craft, Recipes, I’ve always enjoyed creating recipes that look as good as they taste. It’s not easy! For Baking Style: Art, Craft, Recipes, the challenge was twofold–to bake the recipes in the order that they appeared in each chapter to facilitate the coordination of background materials and to capture their inherent lusciousness in a very primal way. The recipe that posed a real challenge for me to bake for capturing in an image was my brown sugar toffee cake. Cake, in general, seems to create visual problems and this simple but wildly delicious Bundt cake looks so basic–and I was not willing to prepare a more complicated version just to suit its appearance. A few days before the art session that included this sweet, I came up with the idea to present the cake with every other slice pulled out and, in the end, its look is one of my favorite baking images in the book and turned out to be a very simple solution to the presentation.
Baking Style Tracker: My blondie cake appeared within Project Foodie, and it is one fun-and-easy sweet to make–part cake, part bar cookie. A whisk-in-the-bowl batter, so deliciously simple, and a favorite recipe from Baking Style: Art, Craft, Recipes.
baking style diary reflects on favorite cookies: Developed for Food & Wine magazine, my recipe for Large and Luscious Two-Chip Oatmeal Cookies is a cookie jar gem.
VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health…for Good by Mark Bittman offers–among the range of recipes–simple-to-make breakfast items for powering-up your day. Notably, both the Banana Parfaits, mashed bananas layered with cereal and fruit, and the Breakfast Pilaf, Sweet or Savory, a type of morning porridge based on using short-grain brown rice, conform to the author’s mission statement on healthful eating–deliciously.
