This cookbook can turn anyone into a baker

Book review: Basics Desserts

Author: Caroline Bourgeois

Publisher: Hardie Grant

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cookbook with a more user-friendly design.

This book is really, really useful, whether you are an aspiring patisserie chef like my eldest daughter, or amateur bakers in training, like my second and third eldest daughters.

I even saw a few recipes in the book that I thought would be simple enough to do with my younger ones.

I liked how the book is visually presented, using mostly pictures and graphics and being very low on text instructions. This makes the method very quick to digest and can be grasped at a glance.

I would recommend this to anyone who is learning or teaching baking.

Basics Desserts has more than 60 simply presented recipes including for confections that would ordinarily intimidate learner bakers, like crème brûlée or flans.

The recipes also vary between very basic, like spongecake, to decadent, like truffles and pavlova and it even has a few healthy options thrown in.

The proof in this pudding was the ease with which all my daughters successfully made two desserts, using only the book for guidance.

My eldest can bake fairly well and independently and she managed to bake both apple crumble and brownies without needing any assistance from me.

My second and third eldest usually need a lot of hand holding but with this book as a guide, they made a batch of brownies successfully without help or flops.