Colder weather is an invitation to turn the oven on and start baking.
Here are just a few recent cookbooks on cakes, cookies and pies.
□ Cake Keeper Cakes (Taunton Press, $17.95) offers 100 recipes for honest-to-goodness everyday cakes, the kind meant to be kept on the counter under a plain glass dome. Author Lauren Chattman's recipes for cinnamon pudding cake and almond brown butter cake conjure winter days and warm milk. Pear cake with sea-salt caramel sauce appears dinner-party worthy without being fussy.
Fig and cornmeal with pine nuts or chocolate chipotle is a rich buttermilk loaf with a subtle, smoky kick, and it strikes just the right balance between comfort and sophistication. Make no mistake: These are not quick cakes. But they are simply simple cakes -- no frosting, no flower cut-outs, no intimidation.
□ Birthday Cakes for Kids (Ryland, Peters & Small, $19.95) is a good place to go for over-the-top creations sure to please any 6-year-old. Recipes go from relatively simple "ice cream" cupcakes served in cones, to bunnies, dinosaurs, tractors, train sets and carousels. Yet author Annie Rigg has made it seem simple.
Basic recipes for yellow cake and buttercream serve as the base for many recipes, and the book also offers step-by-step-instructions and diagrams for cutting patterns, piping decorations and using food coloring. The "fantastic chocolate cake," a three-tiered chocolate buttermilk extravaganza stacked like a wedding cake and frosted with rich buttercream, lives up to its name.
□ The Ultimate Shortcut Cookie Book (Sourcebooks, $24.99) targets would-be bakers who don't have a lot of time. Author Camilla V. Saintsbury takes a simiilar approach as Anne Byrn in her best-selling Cake Mix Doctor books, doctoring refrigerated dough and cake mixes with butter, chocolate chips, oatmeal, fruit and other "from-scratch" ingredients.
The 745 recipes for drop cookies, fancy cookies, bars, brownies and frostings presented in easy-to-read broad type are appealing and well-suited for kids to help.
Almond joyfuls boost prepared sugar cookie dough with coconut, almonds and chocolate chips. More exotic treats such as blackberry sage thumbprints and spicy chocolate-filled Aztec cookies aim beyond the chewy, gooey kid-friendly cookies at a more adult palate.
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