The Perfect Recipe Baking Book: 50 Foolproof Recipes for America's Classic Cakes, Pies, Cookies, and More

Murray Jaffe wondered the same thing, which led him to write The Perfect Recipe Baking Book. Subtitled 50 Foolproof Recipes for America's Classic Cakes, Pies, Cookies, and More, it contains one reliable version of many popular items such as the aforementioned chocolate cake (water, no milk, and unsweetened cocoa), as well as pies, fruit crisps, quick breads, cookies, brownies, and muffins.

The compact book is perfect for two kinds of cooks: beginners who need the reassurance of no-fail recipes and old hands who have too many cookbooks and too little patience to page through them all. Jaffe, who wrote the book at age 79 after retiring as chief executive officer of a multimillion-dollar wholesale bakery business, has provided ample, clear instructions on the proper equipment, ingredients, and procedures that help guarantee success. The Perfect Recipe Baking Book is welcome because sometimes you just want to bake a banana cream pie or a blueberry coffee cake without conducting a research project first. --Brenda Pittsley

The array of recipes in "The Perfect Recipe Baking Book" is wonderfully refreshing in its simplicity. The classics are all here: coconut macaroons, devil's food cake, blueberry pie. Jaffe, a self-described obsessive baker, provides foolproof directions for perfect desserts. His apple pie can beat the pants off of any hazelnut praline cheesecake. And best of all, the ingredients are guaranteed to be available in your local grocery store. No more scouring the city for Poire Williams or dried golden cherries! This really is the only dessert cookbook you will ever need.

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The Collected Short Works, 1920-1954
Bess Streeter Aldrich
Manufacturer: University of Nebraska Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Essays | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Anthologies | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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General | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0803210523

During the first half of the twentieth century, Bess Streeter Aldrich became one of the most highly paid and widely read American authors of her time. Among the most noteworthy of frontier writers, Aldrich published her short work in such leading magazines as Cosmopolitan, Colliers, Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and the Saturday Evening Post. Her most famous novel, A Lantern in Her Hand, has remained a favorite since it was first published in 1928. All of her subsequent novels were also bestsellers.

Aldrich’s portrayals of pioneers, farm people, and small town traders—their spirit and enterprise—won the admiration of the nation. Unlike such contemporaries as Sinclair Lewis and Hamlin Garland, Aldrich saw the better side of Main Street. Honesty, hard work, friendship, and family life are constant themes in her writings.

This second volume of The Collected Short Works brings together over thirty of Aldrich’s short stories and essays published between 1920 and 1954, the year of her death. With this collection Aldrich’s admirers have ready access to many hard-to-find works. Some of the stories appear here for the first time since their original publication.

Beloved by readers for decades, Bess Streeter Aldrich earned a national reputation with a long list of best-selling novels and with stories appearing in major magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal, Harper’s Weekly, Colliers, McCalls, and The Saturday Evening Post. Her most famous novel, A Lantern in Her Hand, has remained a favorite since first published in 1928.

Carol Miles Petersen has thoroughly researched Aldrich, consulting Aldrich’s family, neighbors, and friends, poring over letters and newspapers, and reading Aldrich’s work again and again. In Bess Streeter Aldrich she reveals a woman as strong and substantial as Aldrich’s fictional heroines.

Born in Iowa in 1881, Bess Streeter grew up and attended college there. After becoming a teacher, she met and fell in love with Charles “Cap” Aldrich, formerly Captain in the U.S. Army. After their marriage in 1907, they moved to Elmwood, Nebraska, where Bess devoted herself to raising children while Cap became a banker.

Bess began to write and sell short stories, winning a national award and enjoying the celebrity of a famous author. It appeared that the Aldriches would live happily ever after; however, in 1925, Captain Aldrich suddenly died. The responsibilities of raising the family and managing the bank as a partial owner fell upon Bess. With the stock market crash of 1929, the nation’s banking system spun into chaos—more than ever, her family, her bank, and her town depended on Bess.

Aldrich’s heroism is of the old-fashioned kind, not a moment of glory but a lifetime of effort, not a battle with a foe but a creation of love, humor, and kindness. Her stories were written to remind her readers of the joy of life.

Seemingly a bit ludicrous and even comical, the quarter-life crisis is actually a very real phenomenon afflicting more rudderless twenty-somethings with each passing year. In Generation What?, young up-and-coming writers recount their individual quarrels between hoping to exist on the fringes of childhood and wanting to participate in the arena of adult responsibility.

Some heartbreaking, some humorous, the essayists' disparate topics-passionless marriage, fallible parents, Peace Corps survival, cutting the college-life cord, and the like-run the gamut of disillusionment, denial, and yes, even deliverance.

The Lost Generation nursed the devastating wounds of World War I. The Greatest Generation conquered both the Great Depression and totalitarianism. The Beat Generation sped along the counterculture pathways. The Baby Boomers embraced protests and free love, while Generation X birthed mass technology and postmodern malaise. And Generation Y-the young people of the millennium who have more resources, technology, and education than any before-has . . . what?

Essayists include editors from Broken Pencil and JANE magazine and contributors to The New York Times, The Village Voice, BUST, Adbusters, and PLENTY, as well as young authors with books forthcoming from Harper Perennial and Simon & Schuster.

Bess Vanrenen currently calls Denver, Colorado, home, although she has also lived in Brooklyn, Reno, and Maadi, Egypt. For anyone hoping to induce a quarter-life crisis, Bess recommends graduate school.

"Miniature Rooms" begins with a brief history of Mrs. Thorne and how the rooms came to be. The rest of the book is a complete catalog of the Rooms, divided into two sections - the European rooms and the American rooms. Every room is beautifully photographed from at least two angles, using the existing lighting in the rooms so that each has the same realistic quality enjoyed in the Institute. Along with each photograph is a description of the room and its furnishings. I would recommend "Miniature Rooms" to anyone who enjoys the Art of Miniatures.