My Most Favorite Dessert Company Cookbook

Delicious Pareve Baking Recipes
by Doris Schechter (HarperCollins)

It takes most cooks years to perfect the art of kosher baking (foods and food combinations that conform to strict Jewish biblical laws). Substitutions (margarine instead of butter, for instance) and other rules make it a challenge. The good news, now that Chanukah has arrived, is that Doris Schechter can considerably cut down your learning curve. Let her 20 years as one of New York City's top kosher bakers (she owns My Most Favorite Dessert Company) turn you into an instant expert. Chapters cover loaf cakes, layer cakes/specialty cakes, pies/tarts and cookies. Holidays are covered throughout and Passover gets its own chapter. Besides traditional favorites, standouts include: pineapple-macadamia nut cake; strawberry tea bread; apricot meringue bars; and shadow cake (a sinfully rich blend of chocolate and vanilla cakes, chocolate mousse, orange-scented sugar syrup, buttercream and a chocolate glaze). Oil (representing the sacred oil used in the menorah in the recaptured temple), of course, plays a part in most traditional Hanukkah recipes, such as potato latkes and jelly doughnuts. Following are the best doughnuts Schechter has ever tasted.

RECIPE: Jelly Doughnuts

More Cookbook Reviews