In This Book, Baking Is a Breeze

Bake Club: 101 Must-Have Moves for Your Kitchen

When Covid hit, Milk Bar founder Christina Tosi began what turned into Bake Club by livestreaming a baked good daily for 365 days straight. She brings that energy level to this book with its breezy, you-can-do-it attitude, mostly successfully.

Too often, food people proclaim that to bake requires scientific precision plus at least some understanding of the underlying science, but the legion of lazy and slightly haphazard cooks who nevertheless bake successfully know that’s bunk.

Of course, some recipes really do require precision, and the science is often pretty cool, but most recipes are flexible to some extent in both ingredients and amounts. While many bakers love using a scale to weigh their ingredients for speed and, yes, precision—and it’s deeply annoying that Tosi acts as though she’s doing readers a favor by not bothering to give weights—most of us have ancestors who baked successfully using just a coffee cup and a spoon.

Helping new and experienced bakers to adopt a give-it-a-whirl attitude seems like a gift in a world where blog commenters get so nervous about making any substitution that they’ll ask things like “will the recipe still work if I use pecans instead of walnuts?” In keeping with the Covid theme of bare grocery shelves that forced improvisation, Tosi leans toward fairly short ingredient lists, with tips and substitutions for most recipes.

So she notes for a skillet cake that bakers can use any vegetable that shreds—reassuring them that a standard carrot cake recipe works just as well with beets, parsnips, zucchini, sweet potato, or butternut squash. Or a mint filling for sandwich cookies can be replaced with caramel sauce, fruit curd, jam, fudge sauce, or frosting—and of course each of those recipes comes complete with its own variation.

Recipes run the gamut from building blocks such as flavored whipped cream, jams, lemon curd, and basic wafer cookies, to cakes, breakfast treats, breads, and snacks. These are not high-concept desserts, for the most part. Rather, sticking with breezy fun, Tosi offers up recipes such as gummy bears, pop rocks, graham cracker toffee, whipped cream flavored with cereal, pretzels, or doughnuts, and bar cookies made from store-bought cookie dough, Ritz crackers, crunchy cookies, mini marshmallows, Bugles, and sweetened condensed milk.

Recipes often take advantage of the inherent qualities of an ingredient to up the flavor ante, such as cookies that swirl together a chocolate chip brownie batter with a ground-pretzel blondie batter, for a classic salty-sweet combination.

The gummy bears aren’t, really—just fruit juice heavily set with gelatin—but it’s a nice change to know what’s in your candy and control the flavors. Some of her simplest recipes offer deep pleasure with that flavor control, such as very adaptable, four-ingredient brown sugar wafers. Crisp chocolate wafers, which could stand in for the late, lamented Famous Chocolate Wafers necessary for icebox cakes and crumb crusts, last for weeks in a cookie jar and could take experimentation with a variety of extracts or spices. (But one more weight complaint—this is the sort of spot where providing weights, for bakers who own scales, would have been so appreciated. The ability to drizzle honey straight into a bowl on a scale versus scooping it out of a tablespoon measure—twice—just shouldn’t be too much to ask.)

Sometimes, though, necessary details waft away with the easy-breezy. A citrus jam calls for using entire oranges, lemons, or grapefruits cut into chunks, but she fails to note the need to remove seeds before running them through the food processor. This isn’t OK in any recipe, but especially not a book like this whose aim is to give bakers confidence. Though the headnote says this is also a great way to use up squeezed citrus shells, she gives no hints at whether anything should be adjusted to make up for the missing juice or weight. And because of her attitude about weights, she leaves fruit amounts too wide-open to interpretation, calling for 3 large oranges or 5 lemons. Lemons vary widely, and what counts as a large orange? Probably the recipe works fine regardless, but would a mention like “about one pound” have been so painful? (She also notes it scales up “like a dream,” but with no mention of how much might be too much.)

To a lesser extent, details disappear when recipes don’t seem to match their accompanying photos, such as a chocolate jellyroll cake filled with ice cream. The photo shows a distinctive green swirl in the middle of the ice cream, but the recipe provides precisely zero hints about its provenance. (Admittedly, photos that include elements never mentioned in a recipe make this reviewer nearly as nuts as failing to give ingredient weights.)

One standout recipe among those tested: basic English muffins. Follow Tosi’s suggestion to refrigerate the dough up to two days for maximum flavor; the tested muffins got a 24-hour chill before shaping and baking. The dough seems like far too little for a dozen muffins, and they do come out on the smaller side, but these light, tender, craggy, crunchy (from the dusting of cornmeal) will stay fresh for days—if eaters can resist that long.

Quick takes:

Bake Club: 101 Must-Have Moves for Your Kitchen, by Christina Tosi and Shannon Salzano. 308 pages. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2024.

Organization: Chapters include pantry basics; “dropoffable” desserts; breakfast baking; bread; cake; “snack aisle;” and “tabletop desserts.”

Ingredients measurement methods: Volume only, unfortunately.

Photos: Photos accompany every recipe, including an inset photo of ingredients that reinforces how few ingredients are needed for most recipes and the reliance on standard grocery-store components.

Index: Well done—comprehensive, listing recipes by main ingredients, name, and category (so English muffins appear under the letter E, and under bread, breakfast, and yeast—but not, appropriately, under muffins).

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