Fresh from the Oven: Over 70 Recipes for Delicious Home Baking

Baking at home is a sensory delight that's all too often passed up by cooks fearful of the precision required and the spectre of wasted effort. With the help of this handy little volume, featuring recipes culled from a number of Hamlyn titles (Fresh Baked, Delicious Food for Diabetes, etc.), whipping up a chocolate cake to rival the neighborhood bakery's couldn't be easier. First-timers should try the foolproof Blueberry and Vanilla Loaf, which requires nothing more than a handful of ingredients stirred together with fresh blueberries; the result is a moist, crumbly delight. Just a bit more complicated, Whisked Sponge Cake with Lemon Curd is filled with a delicate spread of lemony cream. Anyone with a muffin tin can turn out respectable Cranberry Muffins or the more exotic Black Currant and Almond Muffins, which taste ever so faintly of buttermilk. While most of these recipes are beginner-proof, a few demand more advanced skills: a Chocolate Truffle Gateau calls for chocolate modeling paste-a mix of chocolate and liquid glucose-that isn't photographed, making it tough to tell whether your paste looks right. Same goes for a Chocolate Cappuccino Slice, but the result, a pairing of Kahlua-flavored cream and coffee-flavored cake, is so good, one will hardly care how it's supposed to look. Color photographs.