life-changing bakes
Nancy Silverton has been a staple in the baking community for decades. She was the pastry chef for Wolfgang Puck’s Spago when it opened, and went from there to open her own restaurant and bakery. Back when artisan bread wasn’t considered a viable business option, she perfected her bread recipes at La Brea Bakery until the business exploded. Everyone wanted her breads, and all her hard work has been followed by awards, cookbooks, more restaurants, and many accolades.
But all that is not much help in a pandemic. While she was stuck at home, waiting to see when the world open up again, she baked. Because a cookie changed her life.
The first week of lockdown, SIlverton grabbed a cookie that her partner had brought from a local bakery before things shut down. She took one bite and thought it was the epitome of a peanut butter cookie. It had the texture and the flavor she wanted from a perfect peanut butter cookie. And then she realized what she really wanted was for all of the baked goods she ate to taste like the best versions of themselves. So she set out to figure out what that would be. And when she perfected it, she wrote it into this cookbook and eventually shared it with all of us in The Cookie That Changed My Life.
Chapter by Chapter, SIlverton offers up her best. The chapter on breakfasts includes her best Banana Bread, Bran Muffins, Granola, and even Cinnamon Rolls, which she had never included in her cookbooks before. She thought most cinnamon rolls were uninteresting, so she figured out how to make them delicious and presented her secrets to us (she uses a modified milk bread recipe and a cinnamon syrup to create fluffy dough and lots of flavor, if you’re wondering).
Her cookie chapter includes classics like Chocolate Chunk Cookies, Snickerdoodles, Brownies, Rugelach, Iced Animal Cookies, and a buttery Shortbread. There are two chapters for cakes, one for casual cakes, like Angel Food Cake, Pound Cake, Madeleines, Sticky Toffee Pudding, and three different types of cheesecake, depending on what you’re in the mood for. And then there are the dressed-up cakes and cupcakes, if you’re wanting to recreate the Yellow Cake with Chocolate Frosting we all grew up with, Chocolate Cupcakes with Fudge Frosting, Carrot Cake with Brown Butter Cream Cheese Frosting, and a German Chocolate Cake with Caramel between the layers that oozes out.
She took on pies and tarts and made Chicken Pot Pies, Lattice-Topped Apple Pie, Pecan Tart, Lemon Bars, Rice Pudding, and Key Lime Pies. For seasonal fruit desserts, she includes a Meyer Lemon Meringue Tart, Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie, Cherry Cobbler, Apple Crisp, and Honeynut Squash Pie. And of course she includes some favorites from the Bread Basket, like Layered Buttermilk Biscuits, Onion and Sage Focaccia, Corn Bread with Honey Butter, Cheese Twists, Seedy Crackers, and Gougeres,
One of the things I love most about this cookbook is SIlverton’s generosity. If she uses someone else’s recipe as a jumping-off point for hers, she will name names. She will credit the chef and the bakery she found the pastry or the cookbook where she found the recipe. And if she finds something that she feels is already perfect without her input, she asks the chef to include their recipes in her book. There is no ego here, just a desire to include the best possible creations of all her favorite baked goods as well as the ones that she hadn’t really enjoyed previously.(I’m talking about you, Monkey Bread).
Silverton tried to keep the recipes as simple as possible, but her emphasis on flavor and texture does mean that there are some extra steps to some recipes that just can’t be skipped for maximum taste. But if you’re a baker looking for perfection, then let The Cookie That Changed My Life change your life too, or at least make you a better baker.
