Dessert -- how sweet it is

REVIEWS BY SYBIL PRATT

This month we're getting our just desserts and they're just divine -- from the easy to the elaborate, from homespun hand-me-downs to glamorous restaurant reproductions. With so many fabulous new cookbooks devoted solely to desserts and so many options for satisfying those sweet tooth cravings, it's hard to know where to start.

So, let's start with a winner -- a big winner and a big book. In the Sweet Kitchen: The Definitive Baker's Companion by Regan Daley, won the IACP Cookbook of the Year Award 2001, which is sort of like an Oscar and a Pulitzer Prize rolled into one. Daley really means it when she calls her book definitive; more than half of the almost 700 pages are devoted to a wonderfully thorough examination of tools, techniques and ingredients. In a cookbook that's surprisingly fun to read, this talented pastry chef really struts her stuff in the ingredients department. The ingredients go from the obvious (flour sugar, eggs and butter) to a detailed discussion of flavorings, nuts, fruits and sweet vegetables, including one of best ingredient substitution charts and flavor pairing charts I've seen. Then come the recipes -- 140 in all -- and there goes your diet. These sweets, from the somewhat traditional, like Really, REALLY Fudgey Brownies, to the sublimely sophisticated, like Fresh Fig and Pistachio Frangipane Tart with Honeyed Mascarpone, are too good to pass up. Daley believes anyone can equal the experts, as long as they know what they are doing and they use the highest quality ingredients. Daley's exuberant, excellent guidance teaches you how to do both.


Towering delights

If you feel like trying your hand at the sculptural extravaganzas fit for four-star restaurants, you need only pick up Sweet Seasons: Fabulous Restaurant Desserts Made Simple by pastry chef extraordinaire Richard Leach. This award-winning pastissier, who changed the way dessert looks in the fanciest venues across the country, now breaks down the components of his many-splendored sweets into bite-sized pieces. If you don't have the time and some extra hands to help, you can make just one part of a complex confection‹say Chilled Pear Soup without the Goat Cheese Fritters and Honey Tuiles or Pumpkin Praline Pie served solo instead of with Spice Cake, Praline Ice Cream and Pumpkin chips. This is the kind of book that inspires you to reach for heights rarely scaled in the home kitchen‹and there's much to be said for dreaming the impossible sweet dream and, in some cases, making those dreams an epicurean reality.


Chocoholics anonymous

With the able assistance of food writer Dorie Greenspan, Pierre Herme, a premier pastry chef and master dessert designer, offers the answer to every chocoholic's prayer in Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Herme. Pierre has created more than 100 recipes for this celebrated, sensuous, shape-shifting substance that can be creamy, crunchy, hard, soft, hot, cold, darkest brown or milky white. Though all the recipes have been "translated" for the American home kitchen, this is not casual cooking, and that often ignored caveat to read the recipes carefully before starting is imperative here. You don't want to start a Chocolate and Hazelnut Dacquoise, Triple Chocolate Meringue and Ice Cream Puffs or Chocolate-Caramel Truffles without knowing where you're going. But these two pros will keep you on track. The prep instructions are detailed and well thought out, and the results of your effort should win you high marks, gold stars and compliments galore.


Cookie monster

You can get out of your party clothes now and just enjoy the homemade goodness of a plate of cookies. Nancy Baggett, revered baking teacher and long-time cookie connoisseur, has collected recipes from all over our cookie-loving country to create The All-American Cookie Book. She includes little-known regional gems, rediscovered heirlooms, favorites from both small-town sweet shops and chic urban cookie boutiques and some of her own inventions. They're here in all shapes and sizes, from monster to miniature, rolled, dropped, piped, filled with fruit, nuts and candy, iced, spiced, topped with streusel and meringue, brownies, chews, chunkies, jumbles, sables, sandwiches, wafers, meltaways and macaroons. And by incorporating personal reminiscences, culinary history, observations of the current cookie scene and colorful lore into the introductions for this full-range of recipes, Nancy gives us the story-behind-the-cookie and the story of a good, old American baking tradition. That's how the cookie crumbles from simple Nineteenth-Century Sugar Cookies to complete plans for a Gingerbread House with all the trimmings.


My little Buttercup

Staying with the simple and the simply scrumptious, Jennifer Appel, proprietor of the very successful Buttercup Bake Shop in New York, invites you to a walk on the retro side with The Buttercup Bake Shop Cookbook: More Than 80 Recipes for Irresistible, Old-Fashioned Treats. Convinced that we need the comforting cocoon of time-warp baking to offset the cyclonic speed of our cyber-jazzed lives, Jennifer offers 80-plus recipes for satisfying, slow-the-pace baked desserts. If you've been lusting for the tried-and-true taste of a moist, yummy Pineapple Upside-Down Cake, the tang of a perfect Lemon Meringue Pie, real Chocolate Pudding warm from the pan or breakfast-time Blueberry Coffee Cake, lust no more -- just whip up these easy, pleasing recipes and enjoy!

    The Buttercup Bake Shop Cookbook:
    More Than 80 Recipes for Irresistible, Old-Fashioned Treats

    By Jennifer Appel
    Simon & Schuster, $26
    ISBN 0743205790

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Sybil Pratt has been cooking up this column for more than five years.

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