Pastry Love Cookbook Review

Pastry Love Cookbook: A Baking Journal

In this week’s cookbook review, we are back with another excellent pastry cookbook. This time we’ll take a closer look at Joanne Chang’s lats project the Pastry Love cookbook.

James Beard award-winning baker Joanne Chang is best known around the country for her eight acclaimed Flour bakeries in Boston. Chang has published two books based on the offerings at Flour, such as her famous sticky buns, but Pastry Love is her most personal and comprehensive book yet.

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Joanne’s Baking Journal

Pastry Love is like a backstage entry to Joanne’s bakeries. During her time spent as a pastry chef, restaurateur, and cookbook author, Joanne Chang has created many tasty treats and compiled the very best of them here, in what she considers not just a cookbook but her baking journal.

This incredible “journal” includes 125 dessert recipes for many things she could never serve in the setting of a bakery – for example, items that are best served warm or with whipped cream on top. As you’ll realize when reading this book, nothing makes Chang happier than baking and sharing treats with others. Her passion comes through in every recipe, such as Orange Almond Pudding Cake, Mocha Chip Cookies, and Malted Chocolate Cake.

The recipes start off easily such as Lemon Sugar Cookies and build up to showstoppers like Vietnamese Espresso Profiteroles. Thanks to the clever organization of this book it’s very easy to find all these delicious recipes. The content is divided into 8 chapters that go from What’s for Breakfast, I Knead Bread, Afternoon Pick-Me-Up, Easy as Pie, Let Them Eat Cake, Time to Show Off, I Made This for You to Master of Your Pastry Domain.

All the chapters are different from each other, but all of them have delicious and mouth-watering recipes.

A Pastry Lesson

For us, Pastry Love is more than a cookbook or even a baking journal. For us, it’s a pastry lesson from one of the most successful pastry chefs in the world. If you read the book from the first to the last page (we really encourage you to do that) you will learn important lessons and essential techniques that will make you a better pastry cook.

The last chapter of this book includes master lessons and essential techniques for making pastry cream, lemon curd, puff pastry, and more. But these are not the only things you will learn. By the time you start reading the first chapter you already learned, master techniques, such as Blind Baking, Cooking Sugar, Making a Cornet or Tempering Ingredients.

And as if all this was not enough to transform this “journal” into a pastry lesson, you’ll also learn about key elements that will make your life in the kitchen easier. From handy equipment like Bain-Mary or Baking pans to single ingredients like sugar or chocolate.

Final Thoughts

Pastry Love is without any doubt one of the best pastry books we reviewed! It not only has delicious and irresistible recipes but also important information that will step up your baking skills. With all the 125 recipes photographed there will be no one who can resist these sweet temptations. For us, Pastry love is a must-have baking bible for all the devourers of baked goods out there.