Gale Gand's short+sweet

By JULIETTE ROSSANT It's still bitterly cold and snowy on the East Coast, and I am still thinking about warm sweet things from the oven. And I am still looking for great baking and dessert cookbooks. What inspired me to pick up short+sweet (New York: Clarkson Potter, 2003) by Gale Gand, star of the Food Network's show Sweet Dreams, was the title. I am all for speed in the kitchen, willing to cut corners in preparation but only if I can still turn out great desserts. When I flipped through short+sweet, however, I found a section at the back I wasn't expecting, "kids in the kitchen". Here's one recipe: "no-clean-up cinnamon-raisin bread" (p. 145). You make the dough in a re-sealable plastic bag (e.g., Ziplock) so you don't have to flour counters and then clean them up after the kids get back to playing. Also, you actually knead the dough and let it rise inside the bag. (Why not do this with lots of recipes?) There are other gems here with fun short cuts, like pumpkin pots (p. 38) that skip pumpkin pie crust. Also, Gand uses saffron and lavender to flavor cookies and cakes, as well as frozen puff pastry, frozen phyllo, store-bought pound cake (served with dulce de leche, p. 55), and frozen pie shells. The only recipe I found hard to fathom was one for cookie burgers (p. 148) that calls for vanilla wafer cookies topped with chocolate, green, yellow and red canned frosting -- yuck! Can you imagine the sugar buzz a child would get off one of those? Other than the cookie burgers, Gand (who is also executive pastry chef and co-owner of Chicago's Tru Restaurant) is good for me. Previous articles: More Food from Alton Brown Manju Malhi's India With Passion SOS: Baking from the Heart Madhur Jaffrey: Our Lady of India, CBE All Hail Alfred Portale Agassi's Star Palate: Celebrity Chefs Book Links: Publisher Amazon.com Technorati Tags: chefs restaurants food cookbooks biography branding -> back to superchefblog