Midwest Made Cookbook Review

Midwest Made: Big, Bold Baking from the Heartland

For us, there are a few things more sentimental than baked goods. Who doesn’t love the smell of freshly baked cookies? To inspire you to bake more, this week we decided to bring you the Midwest Made Cookbook review.

When it comes to defining what we know as all-American baking, everything from Bundt cakes to brownies have roots that can be traced to the great Midwest. German, Scandinavian, Polish, French, and Italian immigrant families baked their way to the American Midwest, instilling in it pies, breads, cookies, and pastries that manage to feel distinctly home-grown.

After more than a decade of living in California, author Shauna Sever rediscovered the storied, simple pleasures of home baking in her Midwestern kitchen, putting together a unique collection of recipes.

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A Journey to the Heart of the Midwest

Midwest Made it’s not like other pastry books that we are used to seeing. In this book, Sever decided to go on a road trip to explore her midwestern roots. She not only visit bakeries with legendary specialties, but she also delved through old churches and community cookbooks to try to find the best and most authentic baked goods of the Midwest.

This book is a representation of the different cultures of immigrants that influenced this region. The different Midwestern states can lay claim not only to hot dish casseroles and amber fields of grain but also to a hearty dessert tradition brought over with a rich immigrant heritage. For Sever, the Midwest ranges from western Pennsylvania through Kansas, Nebraska, and Dakotas; and from Minnesota down to Missouri and northern Kentucky.

As she stretched her wings in her new Midwestern kitchen, she developed what she calls the 5 tenets of Midwest baking: Bake Big, Bake Easy, Bake with Purpose, Bake from the Past, Bake in the Present. Her emphasis is on practicality, making all recipes easy to make with ingredients that people have on hand.

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Bake Big

In Midwest Made you need to be ready to bake big! This book puts together a unique collection of more than 125 recipes that includes refreshed favorites and new treats. Here you will find influences from all over the world, from the Danish Kringle, German Lebkuchen to Turkish Baklava.

We tried some of the recipes in this book, and they were all pretty authentic and delicious. Be ready to use lots of butter and sugar, and all the good stuff required to make awesome sweets. In addition to being delicious, the recipes are all easy to make! The ingredients are listed in order they are needed, the measurements are given in cups as well as in metric system units, and the temperatures are shown in Fahrenheit and Celsius.

Most of the recipes are big enough to feed a crowd or supply a table at a bake sale. You definitely will find yourself sharing the baked goods you make with all your friends and family.

The only thing we would love to see in these recipes is photographs. Unfortunately, not all the recipes have mouth-watering photos. However, this is just a tiny issue in all the good thins this book as to offer.

Final Thoughts

The Midwest Made is a fantastic cookbook that shows the best-baked goods that the Midwest as to offer. This is a book full of delicious recipes, that are meant to be shared with the ones we love most. If you like to bake, and if you want to know more about the delicious sweets of the Midwest you will love this book.