Baking Up Bright, Sweet Vibes
Good Vibes Baking: Bakes to Make Your Soul Shine and Your Taste Buds Sing
Ebullient. Buoyant. Exuberant, effusive, irrepressible. All these descriptions may come to mind reading the opening pages of Good Vibes Baking, by Great British Bake Off finalist Sandro Farmhouse. “Bakes to Make Your Soul Shine and Your Taste Buds Sing,” promises the subtitle, and photos show a man having some serious fun with color, swirls, swoops, and height—12-layer red velvet cake, anyone? Farmhouse’s recipes may also leave eaters feeling ebullient from the sheer sugar rush; that red velvet cake’s frosting calls for 11½ cups of sugar atop the cake batter’s 3½ cups of brown sugar. The recipe yields 18 to 20 servings, but that’s still nearing a cup per person. Choose wisely, then, from the 75 recipes; if you do, your exuberance may outlast your sugar crash.
A recipe sampler: raspberry and lemon eclairs; espresso martini cheesecake; sticky banana cake; cookies and cream cake; sex on the beach cake; prosecco and raspberry cake; black forest cookies; “easy-peasy ‘I do” wedding cake”; banoffee eclairs; giant heart cookie; gin and tonic cheesecake bites; layered pavlova cake; and more variations of eclairs, pavlova, crepes, and tiramisu.
Good vibes means cakes and other desserts get covered with multicolored splatters, chocolate drips, and drizzles—there’s a whole lotta drizzling going on—gold leaf, and real and icing flowers. Crepes get heavy squirts of food coloring to create a rainbow crepe cake; cake gets topped with caramel popcorn; pancakes get filled with sprinkles and topped with whipped cream and glitter.
Recipes run a complexity gamut. A simple one for chocolate truffles—made even simpler by pouring the chocolate mixture into a pan to chill, then cut into cubes instead of painstakingly rolling each truffle into a ball—precedes a chocolate hazelnut cake recipe. That cake requires: roasting hazelnuts; making two layers of hazelnut cake, cleaning the pans, then making two more layers of chocolate cake; making a batch of buttercream; making a hazelnut ganache; making a chocolate ganache; and, if you like, using some of the ganache to make a garnish of chocolate-hazelnut truffles.
Blueberry cinnamon rolls may be the book’s most healthful, easing off the sugar and calling for whole-wheat bread flour. The heartier flavor from the whole wheat nicely complimented the blueberry filling, and the rolls, while best the day they were baked, held well for a second day. The icing felt necessary to keep the rolls interesting and moist, but with just cream cheese, powdered sugar, and butter, it was too thick, sweet, and one-dimensional; bakers should consider boosting it with lemon or lime juice and zest, even a dash of cardamom.
Too often, the book’s breezy vibe—intended to inspire a relaxed, anyone-can-make-these confidence—goes too far, omitting details needed for success. The “Touch the Sky” chapter promises to show “how to make showstopper cakes the easy way.” Farmhouse follows that sentence with a bit of a warning that the chapter is a challenging one, yet reassures readers that “it’s all possible and I know you can do it.”
But his recipe for the “I’ll Bring You Flowers” cake, for example, calls for frosting the cake, then decorating “with sugar roses and [piping] on your favorite petal shapes and flowers all over the cake.” So the crucial part of the cake, according to the title—the flowers—includes essentially no instructions.
The burned honey cake, while good in concept, may also leave a baker feeling slightly roasted.
The batter includes so much leavener—both baking soda and powder—that you can taste it, and too much batter plus that much leavener means the cake nearly overflows in an 8-inch pan; a 9-inch would have been better both for safety and more elegant slices.
But the biggest issue is with the directions for the honey. The recipe starts by boiling 12 ounces of honey until caramelized. The baker is to set aside a bit for the frosting, let the rest cool for 10 minutes, then beat it into a simple cake batter lightly flavored with cinnamon. Farmhouse says to make the frosting while the cake bakes so the reserved honey doesn’t have time to harden, but by that point it already has. (Not to mention that this assumes the baker has read through the whole recipe and remembered to keep going after putting the cake in the oven.) It would have been far better to highlight in the headnote the need to make the frosting quickly, and to move the instructions so bakers make it while the rest of the honey cools for the batter. But, even if a baker adjusts the recipe to overcome those issues, the final product is, again, too one-dimensional and sweet, with a cloying frosting of 1/3 cup of caramelized honey, 10 tablespoons of butter, and 2 cups of powdered sugar.
Although the book provides a recipe for Swiss meringue buttercream, most cakes call for the powdered sugar, butter, and milk frosting often referred to as American buttercream. This type is easy to make and holds up reasonably well, but its cloying, and, yep, one-dimensional sweetness and faint grittiness—so heavy on sugar and light on flavor—should be skipped whenever cooks feel comfortable swapping in the meringue buttercream.
Overall, simpler is often better in these recipes, as the strawberry brownie cookies and Portuguese custard tarts show.
The cookies nicely combine freeze-dried strawberries and dark chocolate for an intense, gooey creation. These, though, would also have benefited from a few more details in the directions, such as telling just how much strawberry to hold back for a garnish. Exuberantly calling for an ice cream scoop to make a dozen or so cookies, Farmhouse holds true to his promises of big, bold baking—but these are rich, so a smaller cookie scoop might be a better bet.
The custard tarts, quickly prepared with puff pastry for shells, makes a classic dessert out of a custard of just a few egg yolks, sugar, cornstarch, milk, and vanilla. Sprinkled with cinnamon at the end (an optional step, but a necessary flavor component…avoid that one dimension!), these also would have benefited from instructions on how to store any uneaten on the first day (refrigerate them). Moreover, they needed to call either for less custard or bigger pastry circles to fit into the muffin cups (Farmhouse calls for a 4-inch round cutter, an uncommon size; use a bowl that measures at least 4 inches, preferably more, across the top as a cutting guide). Taller circles peeking up high from each cup would help avoid custard overflow in the oven; it would also have been good to provide some insurance with a sheet pan underneath. (Try putting the pan in the oven when preheating to help crisp the tart bases as well.) Creamy when warm, these are also tasty cold, though no longer crisp and flaky.
Ultimately, Good Vibes Baking seems best for bakers with at least some experience, who love sugar, love color, and have confidence in their ability to spot pitfalls before they befall them.
Quick takes:
Good Vibes Baking: Bakes to Make Your Soul Shine and Your Taste Buds Sing, by Sandro Farmhouse. 208 pages. Published by DK Publishing, 2024.
Organization: Chapter titles such as “Love Language” and “Touch the Sky” provide essentially no information on what’s in each. The love language chapter description—“recipes to warm up anyone’s heart”—could be said for all the other chapters. At least each chapter opens with a listing of its recipes.
Ingredients measurement methods: Generally listed first by cups, with grams in parentheses except for liquid ingredients, which get put into milliliters.
Photos: A photo accompanies many but not all recipes, with a style that stays true to the bright-colored exuberant vibe.
Index: Reasonably comprehensive, though if you want to look up a recipe by its name, you’re out of luck (look under honey to find the burned honey cake, for example). Given that chapter names are no help—that is, you couldn’t turn to a list of recipes at the beginning of a cake chapter, this is annoying.
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