I Love Desserts: Caprial's Desserts

Caprial's Desserts

by Caprial Pence and Melissa Carey

Caprial's Desserts Caprial Pence has teamed up with Melissa Carey, her pastry chef at Caprial's Bistro, to create another fantastic cookbook, this one entirely devoted to desserts! In preparing the collection, Caprial and Melissa poured through their recipe files, winnowing them down to 50 core recipes, each grounded in the chefs' shared appreciation of wholesome, comforting, no-nonsense desserts that beg to be made time and again. The result is a deeply satisfying, truly essential collection of classic and contemporary recipes for cakes, pies, and tarts; custards and puddings; ice creams and sorbets; and cookies and special-occasion desserts.

Like a culinary school class,Caprial's Desserts focuses on the basic process pastry chefs practice daily—using master recipes and techniques as a springboard for developing creative new desserts. Building on the 50 master recipes, each chapter reveals how they can be finessed to create one exciting variation after another. Along the way, clear step-by-step photographs put you alongside Caprial and Melissa in their kitchen as they share their secrets for making extraordinary pie dough, working wonders with an ice cream machine, perfecting the delicate art of puff pastry, and numerous other essentials of the sweet kitchen. If you are new to baking, this book will give you the confidence, inspiration, and skills to build a solid dessert repertoire; if you are an experienced baker, it will help you hone classic techniques and push you to new levels of creativity and improvisation in the kitchen. A model of beauty and clarity, Caprial's Desserts is destined to become a well-thumbed and flour-caked fixture on your kitchen bookshelf.

* Full-color photography throughout, including over 60 illustrations of fundamental pastry-making techniques.

* Master recipes and variations range from a Classic Apple Pie (reworked into an irresistible Maple-Bourbon Apple Pie) to delicate Mascarpone Ice Cream (taken to dizzying heights as Tiramisu Ice Cream) to all-time favorite Chocolate Brownies (transformed into a positively decadent Brownie Mousse Cake).

* Caprial's books have sold over 200,000 copies.

"Melissa's take on pastry matches the philosophy we've maintained at the Bistro from the beginning: to steer clear of frou-frou, overwrought creations that simply look beautiful but fall short in flavor and substance. In other words, we would go for a piece of piping hot apple pie topped with a scoop of homemade vanilla ice cream over a mousse-filled chocolate sculpture any day, and experience shows our customers would, too. While I'm not a pastry chef by training, the desserts I make at home reflect the same approach."—From the Introduction

CAPRIAL PENCE is the chef/co-owner of Caprial's Bistro in Portland, Oregon, which opened in 1992. Caprial has won the praise of critics nationwide, as well as many awards, including the 4-star Mobile Award and AAA 4-Diamond Award. Also, shortly after graduating from the Culinary Institute of America, she was named Best Chef in the Northwest by the James Beard Foundation. In 1995, her Learning Channel cooking show, Caprial's Café, was nominated for the Beard Foundation's Best Television Cooking Show Award. Caprial Pence Web site: http://www.caprial.com.

MELISSA CAREY has created scrumptious desserts as the pastry chef at Caprial's Bistro for the past three years.

Buy the Book!

Caprial's Desserts
by Caprial Pence and Melissa Carey
Ten Speed Press, 2001
$32.50 (CAN $52.00)
Hardcover, 272 pages
ISBN: 1-58008-285-8
Information provided by the publisher.