The Pastry Chef's Guide: The ultimate baking cookbook with simple recipes from bestselling Junior Great British Bake Off judge

When I purchased this book, I was very keen on the idea of this being a 'guide'; as in it's going to help me navigate the world of pastry, answering questions and unearthing new ideas to me as I went along. What this book is, however, could be considered a mildly supplemented recipe book.

As a recipe book, this thing falls flat. LIke 1-star level flat. A recipe book needs to have pictures. Large, glorious, full page, full color, honest to goodness pictures. This book has a couple of small foldouts (horrible photos that look like they were shot in the 1970s) and a few poorly drawn diagrams interspersed throughout. It really gives the feel of a book that was printed 50 years ago, and not in a good way. Are the recipes contained good? Maybe, who knows, but without some sort of visual, I'm not motivated in the least to try any of them.

Ok, so it fails as a recipe book, but it wasn't marketed as such. However, as a guidebook, this thing misses two key target audiences. For the somewhat initiated, it offers now new information and would be a relatively useless addition to their library. For the novice, it provides no real guidance to help direct you through the world of pastry. There are lists of different types of pastry and recipes, but there is no theory, the methods are poorly described, and it leaves far too many questions unanswered. There should have been a chapter on flour, different types, whole grain vs. white, gluten content, protein percentages, etc. As another example, she should have delved more in depth regarding butter. She says to get stuff that's 82% butterfat, but how the heck are you supposed to do that? I mean, she doesn't even mention of the importance of ensuring your oven is calibrated properly or weighing ingredients vs. using volume measurements. Come on, provide me some GUIDANCE as the title promised.

I'm relatively green when it comes to pastry and after reading this book, I have no more knowledge than I did before, no real guidance that was conveyed, and I've definitely not been given "The Secret to Successful Baking Every Time". What I do have is a list of fancy sounding french names to look up on Google to find recipes I might actually want to try. So if this book falls flat as a recipe book, assumes too much foundational knowledge to be of use to novices, and too little meat/theory to appeal to the more experienced, then who exactly is this book intended to target?

Sorry to Ravneet, but if you're in the market for something to learn about pastry, I recommend you save your money and get something else. I honestly feel I got more direction and information from my Rosanna Pansino cookbook, which is the culinary equivalent of bubblegum pop (my daughter and I love you, Rosanna!).

I was so excited to get this book but was not impressed like I thought I’d be . There’s no photos next to the recipe, and most recipes in there are nothing special, just lemon loaf and puffs. Her instagram is lovely which is why I bought her book but I don’t think a lot of what she posts is in her book at all. Will return .

Amazingly, this book so annoyed me that I was motivated to write my very first review. I didn't even look at the book very much, because the first recipe I tried I realized that the font the publisher used treats fractions in a way that makes them basically illegible. For a baking book, this is absurd. Fractions, i.e. 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, 1/3, etc. can make or break a recipe. The font is styled so that the entire fraction has to fit in the vertical space and makes it TINY. What a mistake by the publisher. If I were the author I would be so upset. Maybe she is.

I like her introductory section on the science behind baking a lot.

I wonder why her graham cracker recipe uses regular flour since the whole intention of the graham cracker was to use a more whole wheat flour for health back in the day.

Her chocolate chip cookie recipe calls for baking powder yet the dough is to sit in the fridge for 12 hours. Won’t the moisture make the baking powder irrelevant in that time frame?

I like that her weights are in metric. Yay! It’s one of the things that I dislike about America’s Test Kitchen.

As I try her recipes I will post my results in my f-book group Jay Francis Secret Recipes Group.

I’m glad I downloaded the digital version for ease of use on my iPad.

Update #1: Chocolate chip cookie recipe: Greasier than I would like. Not pleased with the amount of baking soda, salt and baking powder in her recipe. Mouthfeel is “meh”. Hard to beat the original Toll House recipe. An acceptable cookie but not a spectacular cookie. I won’t ever make them again.

Nice