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gluten_freeCraveworthy Baking: Delicious Dairy-Free and Gluten-Free Cakes, Cookies, Breads, and More, by Danielle Cochran:
An attractive book with color photos for every recipe and helpful headnotes, but I can't recommend it because there are just too many things that can go wrong here. Recipes rely on unspecified GF flour mixes, which are fast and convenient, but every flour mix works differently, and they're not always interchangeable. The book also calls for a variety of dairy-free products like vegan butter, milk, buttermilk, sour cream, heavy cream, and sweetened condensed milk. These products also have different ingredients and consistencies and, thus, results. And that's too many variables when it comes to baking.
More than anything this reads like a baker's personal recipe box that's been sanitized to remove any brand loyalties. Cochran doesn't even recommend any flour mixes (commercial or DIY) in the introduction. She says this is because all brands aren't available in all markets, which any thinking person understands, but it also doesn't give us a chance to duplicate those flour mixes at home. The internet is filled with copycat recipes for popular commercial mixes. Those of us with restricted diets are used to making shit work. But this was nothing but a waste of my time.
If you're a baker with a lot of experience with substitutions, you could probably make these recipes work on vibes alone, though I'm not sure why you'd want to (I certainly didn't). If you're new to GF/DF baking, the author doesn't provide the tools to understand what, exactly, you're looking for, vibes-wise, so this probably isn't the best place to start.
An attractive book with color photos for every recipe and helpful headnotes, but I can't recommend it because there are just too many things that can go wrong here. Recipes rely on unspecified GF flour mixes, which are fast and convenient, but every flour mix works differently, and they're not always interchangeable. The book also calls for a variety of dairy-free products like vegan butter, milk, buttermilk, sour cream, heavy cream, and sweetened condensed milk. These products also have different ingredients and consistencies and, thus, results. And that's too many variables when it comes to baking.
More than anything this reads like a baker's personal recipe box that's been sanitized to remove any brand loyalties. Cochran doesn't even recommend any flour mixes (commercial or DIY) in the introduction. She says this is because all brands aren't available in all markets, which any thinking person understands, but it also doesn't give us a chance to duplicate those flour mixes at home. The internet is filled with copycat recipes for popular commercial mixes. Those of us with restricted diets are used to making shit work. But this was nothing but a waste of my time.
If you're a baker with a lot of experience with substitutions, you could probably make these recipes work on vibes alone, though I'm not sure why you'd want to (I certainly didn't). If you're new to GF/DF baking, the author doesn't provide the tools to understand what, exactly, you're looking for, vibes-wise, so this probably isn't the best place to start.