By my friend, writer and pastry chef David Lebovitz. This book is filled with great desserts and useful explanations for cooking methods. ~Elise

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Product Description

Always Save Room for Dessert

Especially if it's one of David Lebovitz's signature showstoppers. In his first cookbook, Room for Dessert, he offers more than 110 recipes for sweet everythings. You'll find sensational cakes, custards, soufflés, tarts, pies, cobblers, sorbets, ice creams, cookies, and candies, each designed to tempt the diner.

In the introduction David writes of one of his earliest dessert memories--a bowl of freshly picked blackberries, perfectly ripe, topped with a dollop of sour cream and a sprinkle of sugar. "When you search out the best ingredients, do as little to them as possible, and serve them in a straightforward way, the presentation follows naturally," he writes. "A glossy custard looks best with a, swirl of whipped cream; a cool tapioca pudding looks enticing when it's accompanied by its natural complements--tropical fruits and shaved coconut."

With such an aesthetic, David eventually made his way to Berkeley's legendary Chez Panisse, establishing himself as a pastry cook under the tutelage of Alice Waters and founding pastry chef Lindsay Shere. He shares, the Chez Panisse commitment to fresh, seasonal exceptional ingredients, presented simply and unpretensiously, at their peak flavor. As Alice Waters writes in the books foreward: "David is one of those rare pastry chefs who knows that in desserts, as in all art, the cliché is true: sometimes less is more."

After leaving Chez Panisse, Lebovitz served as pastry chef at Bruce Cost's critically acclaimed Monsoon, experimenting with a wide variety of Asian ingredients and flavors to create more remarkable desserts. Home cooks as well as professionals have been clamoring for the Fresh Ginger Cake recipe, which, finally, is published here. It so often appears at Bay Area restaurants that it's frequently listed on menus as "Dave's Ginger Cake." Make it once and you'll immediately want to add it to your list of tried and true standbys. David offers comforting yet sophisticated versions of everyone's favorites, including Gingersnaps, Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies, and Coconut Macaroons, surefire hits for people of all ages. For grown-ups, there are homemade liqueurs and cordials. Add to this delectable ice creams and frozen treats, as well as jams, preserves, and candied fruits, and you get an idea of the incredible scope of David Lebovitz's talents.

Beautifully illustrated with seventy-five full-color photographs by San Francisco's Michael Lamotte, Room for Dessert is as stunning to look at as it is to cook from. With this remarkable debut, David Lebovitz offers his expert hand to guide a new audience of readers and home dessert makers.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #134322 in Books
• Published on: 1999-11-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

Amazon.com
Baking books abound, but none presents a more mouthwatering selection of contemporary sweets than David Lebovitz's Room for Dessert. A former pastry cook at Chez Panisse in California, Lebovitz offers more than 110 recipes for cakes, curds, soufflés, tarts, pies, cobblers, ice creams, cookies, and more, beautifully depicted by color photos. He also manages, as few other baking book authors do, to provide lucid technical guidance, so even novice bakers should have success with his recipes. Readers searching for a solid collection of doable desserts, from homey to dress-up (but never too bedecked) will find the book is just what they're looking for.

Featured are a number of Lebovitz's most acclaimed desserts, including Meyer Lemon Semifreddo, Butternut Squash Pie, and Orange Almond Bread Pudding. Readers will also want to try his modernized Marjolaine (chocolate-covered layers of vanilla and praline creams sandwiched between crisp nut meringues), Fresh Ginger Cake, Mexican Chocolate Ice Cream, and Brown Sugar-Pecan Shortbread, among others. With a chapter on liqueurs and preserves--there's a recipe for a luscious pineapple ginger marmalade, for example--and a presentation of basic formulas that includes dessert sauces (Lebovitz's soft-candied citrus peel topping is a standout), the book, wide in scope yet straightforward in detail, delivers. --Arthur Boehm

Amanda Hesser, New York Times
SIMPLE AND SWEET FROM A MASTER BAKER (excerpts): Room For Dessert... is as endearing as it is brilliantly appealing, because Mr. Lebovitz writes with a personal touch. It could be catagoried as a chef's cookbook, but that would be an unfortunate label, as most of those thick compendiums are full of desserts meant to be composed by a team of cooks, not by a home cook with a conventional oven.

Mr. Lebovitz hands you over a collection of his best recipes and leaves you to assert your own know-how....His instructions are clear and simple, and the recipes are so good that it becomes clear what a master baker he is without his announcing it himself with complex recipes.

Flo Braker, author of The Simple Art of Perfect Baking and Sweet Miniatures: The Art of Making Bite-Size Desserts
"David Lebovitz's distinctive desserts offer the best of both worlds--heavenly flavor combinations and down-to-earth techniques. Every page is rich with information which this fine pastry chef has gleaned for home cooks everywhere. Follow me: I can't wait to bake my way through this fabulous dessert book."

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Customer Reviews

Best Ginger Cake Ever
I love this book.
Intense flavors, great technique, baking I can manage as a non-baker.
I also have the "In The Sweet Kitchen" tome, but find this is the book I return to . . .

Good mix of different types of sweets, great basics for important fancy things, very versatile.

Great little gift for anyone
If there's someone in your life who likes to cook, this is a great gift for any small occasion. My gift recipient was very appreciative and said the recipes were very good.

Thoughtful, Informative, Delicious, Doable Desserts.
This is David Lebovitz' first of two books on desserts. The second is devoted entirely to desserts made with fruits. This volume is more general, including recipes for just about every different type of dessert you may think of. The collection is weighted in favor of recipes which would work well in a restaurant, so the number of recipes typical to the home are less common than you may find in a more general book on dessert baking. That is not to say this is a poor book. In fact, I am happy I reviewed Lebovitz' more recent book first, so I was able to appreciate the virtues of this book which were missing from the second volume.

Lebovitz' introductory chapter on `Essentials' is divided into three sections, each an extremely useful tool to the home baker. First, is a discussion of equipment, which seems to me to be one of the best around for baking tools. The ingredients section is similarly useful, although I wish the author, who is so careful to be precise about other items would avoid the descriptions of `bittersweet' or `semisweet' for chocolate and use, instead the percent cocoa grades as used by Vahlrona, a brand which Lebovitz endorses. The third section of essentials on Fruits is the star of this part of the book. The author not only gives the best season and the best properties and uses for a large number of fruits, he also supplies an extremely useful picture of each and every fruit, although the picture for coconuts is a bit puzzling. There must be varieties of coconut I have never seen in the very untropical northeast.

Lebovitz must be especially fond of fruits, as this general book has a very large portion of its pages devoted to fruit, with a wealth of interesting information on various varieties. I was especially surprised to learn that the grapefruit is a human invention developed by crossing the pomelo with the orange. Who know. Lebovitz is true to the traditions of current and former Chez Panisse writers such as Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower in that he is especially careful to note the variety names of various fruits and sometimes, like both Alice and Jeremiah, go so far as to specify the botanical species names. This is all very good, except that few markets distinguish types of fruits beyond apples and pears. I have never, ever seen any peaches labeled Carnival, Suncrest, Elegant Lady, Elberta, Flamecrest, or Cal Red. More importantly, I have never seen persimmons distinguished by variety, even though persimmon variety is much more important to the way it is used than with most types of peaches. But all of this is not a reflection on the book, only on the author's access to better than average greengrocers. Bottom line is that the pages on fruits in this book are worth the price of admission.

The various types of desserts discussed, each in their own chapter, are:

Cakes
Custards and Souffles
Fruit Desserts
Sorbets, Sherbets, Ice Creams, and Gelees
Cookies and Candies
Liqueurs and Preserves

As noted above, the author is positively in love with fruits, as they appear in virtually every type of dessert in every chapter. The chapter dedicated to fruit desserts has an especially good discussion on how to make fruit compotes. I confess the author has endeared himself to me by pointedly avoiding the pairing of fruit and chocolate. I have never liked the popular raspberry and chocolate combination, as all those gritty little seeds just seems to spoil the chocolate experience. Lebovitz does cross the line just once in combining blueberries with white chocolate in a tart. I'm good with that.

The book ends with a very worthy chapter on basics which includes separate recipes for tarts, pies, and galettes where many other authors would simply give you a single recipe for all three. As other authors such as Wayne Harley Brachman point out, these three pastries simply have different requirements from their doughs. The basics also includes a section on caramelization guidelines. As this is an extremely scary topic for anyone like myself who has seen just enough Food Network shows to know what can go wrong, this section is invaluable.

The book's list of sources for equipment is better than average as it gives web sites, telephone numbers, and addresses, plus a detailing of what the organization supplies. The photographs are competent and add to the attractiveness of the book. The color scheme is much better than the glaring pink and orange used in the later book. The Bibliography is a delightful addition. I wish every cookbook had one. The entries point to many titles familiar to me and many which are not, which is even better.

This book is strongly recommended, especially for folks who are looking for new desserts for entertaining.