Elizabeth Falkner's Demolition Desserts: Recipes from Citizen Cake Review

Posted by Juanita Avenue on Wednesday, September 1, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)This book is not for the traditional home baker looking for something to bring to next week's pot luck. It's not really for the home baker, period, though Falkner has made an effort to provide thorough explanations (she succeeds) and minimalist versions of each dessert. That is not to say that only a professional will enjoy Demolition Desserts, it's merely that most home cooks aren't going to find a book of composed/plated desserts terribly useful.
If you are looking to expand your baking/cooking skills or to find inspiration, however, you'll be very, very excited. One of Falkner's main approaches to creating a new dessert is taking an old dessert and re-imagining and rearranging it: A Banana Split with pineapple sashimi and brandied cherries, a Lemon Meringue pie where each element gets to shine separately, "Tiramisushi" with biscotti chopsticks. Her ideas and the wacky, approachable layout of this book will really get the ball rolling if your looking for a new approach to the same-old, same-old. She even gets into some food science - there's are pages exploring sugar and different gums and thickners. The marshmallow recipe even has a variation using xanthum gum.
If you want to ease into this, the first chapter explores Chocolate Chip Cookies and the publisher's website offers the Chocolate Chip Espresso Cookies recipe for downloading.
Demolition Desserts is gutsy and inspiring, not for the faint of heart!

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