Rating: 
Summary: Great Baking Book, Lousy Format
Review: Whenever I need a baking recipe at home, this is the book I usually get it from. Here is where one will find shortbread, pancakes, biscuits, devils' food cake, apple pie, and muffins. I use it more often than the rest of my baking books put together. If there is only one baking book on your bookshelf, this is one to have. The author understands what the average home baker is and is not capable of. She also seems to understand that the best recipes are those that have the fewest ingredients. All things considered, it is the baking book I recommend the most often. I find it to be reliable and useful.
In recent years, there has been a plethora of snazzy dessert books. They have beautiful, glossy pages, top notch food styling, a famous name, and a smiling face on the cover. Problem is that the recipes are, at heart, ordinary recipes; they also feature sophisticated techniques and skillful decorations. Worse, they are often poorly edited, and many have not gone through a test kitchen. If you are a professional or advanced amateur pastry chef, they are a treasure trove; for the rest of us, they are useless. The Fanny Farmer Baking Book is entirely different: you will find several hundred classic, easy to do recipes that will become regulars in your home kitchen for years. I was impressed by both the quantity and quality of the recipes.
My main problem with this book is the poor organization. Some of the chapters are 150 pages long, but the table of contents merely lists the chapter title, and there is no other detail. The Pie chapter, for example, has the following sections: Types, Crusts and Toppings, Cooling and Storage, Freezing, Ingredients, Equipment, Dough, Rolling and Shaping, Storing, Basic Master Recipe, more than two dozen crusts and doughs, puff pastry, Toppings, and recipes for pies with: fresh fruit, preserved fruit, deep dish, classics, sweet cheese, cream, chiffon, custard, breakfast, translucent custard, candy, mincemeat, turnovers, dumplings, not to mention a whole section devoted to tarts. Yet, by looking at the scanty table of contents, you would never know this. Likewise the cake chapter: it is thoughtfully organized by cake type, but you would never know this by looking at either the table of contents or chapter head. More than once I have found myself puzzling over the confusing index, and then having to flip through more than 100 pages of text to get the information or recipe I need. Each chapter starts with a master recipe that explains all the tools and steps in excruciating detail that takes several pages; all the of the rest of the recipes in the chapter use that master recipe as the basic technique. Of course, you will never find them unless you take the time and patience to physically leaf through the whole chapter. The last part of the bread chapter features several detailed, reliable recipes for puff pastry and danish.
It has the following chapters: General Information, Pies and Tarts, Cookies, Cakes, Yeast Bread, Quick Bread, Crackers.
There are a few losers (Curry Refrigerator Cookies, Rosewater-Almond Pound Cake, Linzer Torte where the jam is like leather, a one bowl Lemon Pudding Cake that requires two bowls; chocolate cakes using cocoa powder that do not taste all that chocolaty). I object to the name of this otherwise wonderful book. Fannie Farmer never wrote a baking book, and her name does not belong in the title. The author is wrong about her Danish recipe being better than a commercial bakery, and also about storing Irish Soda Bread for 8 hours before eating. In general, however, I have remarkably few quibbles with the information presented.
Rating:
Summary: Tried and true
Review: While this book isn't fancy -- no full color, magazine-quality pictures of finished goods here -- it is as close to no-fail as you can get. These recipes stand the test of time. You cannot lose by using this book often! Anyone who knows anything about baking would love to have this gem as a gift.
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