Baking at Home with The Culinary Institute of America (ISBN 0471450952)

Better books out there:
My main qualm with this book is the same as another reviewer's. I find it unacceptable that there are only volume measurements in this text. These days digital kitchen scales are very easy to come by. Weighing ingredients like flour instead of shoveling them into a measuring cup is yields far more consistent and reliable results. There is no reason why the home cook cannot at least be given the option of measuring the ingredients by weight instead of volume. This book is fine as a collection of recipes (although a few could have benefited from further testing), but if you are interested in really learning baking techniques, there are better books out there (Jeffrey Hammelman's new book on bread, Pie and Pastry Bible....).

I was blown away...:
...by this book. I have borrowed it from my local library several times and now I've finally bought it for myself. I love the pictures and the detailed instructions. I've tried a few of the recipes and they have all worked out very well. You simply can't go wrong with this book!

Baking at its best:
THis big beautiful book is perfect for the beginning or intermediate baker. The recipes are easy to follow, use everyday ingredients and page after page of complete very helpful directions. A must for those who love to bake!

Great book to start learning:
When I first started to learn how to bake, this book proved to be invaluable. It covers a lot of the techniques and basic recipes. I really appreciate the variety of different baked goods to provide the home baker with an arsenal of crowd pleasers. I do have to offer a warning, though. No book can truly substitute a hands on learning course. As much as book can describe what the right stage is for mixing dough for choux for cream puffs, it does not compare to someone who is experienced standing beside you and telling you what you are doing wrong. I maximized the use out of this book because I enrolled in a fundamental baking class. It also helped me to hone many of the recipes. The success of the recipes partly lies in the quality of ingredients the baker selects. I recommend that if you don't go cheap, then most of the recipes should turn out fine. Another challenge that I discovered in baking is that my oven sucks - and this plays a large large role in the success of some of the recipes. I had to adapt many of them to accommodate the deficiencies of my oven. Addressing some of the criticisms of the volume vs weight, there is a reason for this, though not great. The original series of books by CIA, such as The Professional Chef, deal with training exactly that, professional chefs. Therefore the recipes are for 10 or more servings and all are given in weight. This book is more like an excerpt and development from their other book. The problem is that this approach is not "friendly" to many home cooks/bakers as they are accustomed to dealing in volume (or mired in tradition). I figure it was a bit of a compromise in order to sell more books that were appealing to general public. This makes some sense in that measuring cups are cheaper than scales that can weigh out several pounds, and I don't have to have a separate bowl for each thing I weigh. Can you imagine the frustration in a recipe written for 9 cakes requiring 9 pounds and 3 oz of flour, then trying to convert this to proportions for 1 cake? Not only would I need a digital scale, but also a calculator!

Baking at its best!:
This is a totally awesome baking cookbook for the, obviously titled, at-home-baker. The recipes are terrific. I have wow-ed many of my friends with recipes from this book and I don't mind giving away my secrets of where I found the recipe. Once I tell them, everyone says "Oh yeah, no wonder" because they know the recipes come from such an instrumental institution in the culinary world, you wouldn't expect anything less. If you want a book that's not too complicated, yet challenging and entertaining, then this is the book for you. It's a book well worth its price.