Celebrate with Bread Baking: Essential Recipes for Special Occasions Paperback – November 3, 2020

My daughter loved the book and tried some of the recipes already. Great little recipe book, I recommend it.

I love this cookbook! I'm new to breadmaking and this book very simply spells it out for you with tasty recipes! They range from sweet to savory and easy to more difficult and are grouped by seasons, so you can always bake with seasonal ingredients! I definitely recommend this cookbook!

I love these unique recipes!

I have been baking bread for my family for over 20 years and I have amassed a good collection of cookbooks on the subject of bread and bread baking. I was interested in this book, with the thought of making more holiday breads (such as stollen, for example). This book delivers and is filled with all kinds of bread recipes for special occasions, but it definitely lacks some pictures that would make it even better.One of the things I learned a while back is that measuring ingredients by mass instead of volume is important for getting very consistent results in bread baking. Many cookbooks out there have taken the approach of having measures by mass and by volume together, and this cookbook takes that approach which is a good thing. This makes this book more accessible for bakers of different skill levels or have different thoughts on measures. Most recipes in this book follow this format carefully, resorting to only volume measures when it would otherwise be impractical to weigh ingredients (such as 1/8 teaspoon dry measures).The author presents a good bit of material up front on bread basics as well as some more advanced topics. This includes care and feeding of sourdough starters, which is a topic I did not expect in a general collection. Often, sourdough is covered either separately as a primary topic or in a dedicated work. It’s not unwelcome here at all and is very much relevant – many of the traditional breads presented are typically made with such starters.The collection is broken up by seasons – Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter, with a final chapter on special occasion breads. The seasonal breads should make sense to most – Christmas stollen, Easter breads, etc. The special occasion breads are suitable for when having special company or celebrating special events, and these generally do not really fit into the other chapters. The categorization is well-defined and there isn’t much overlap which is unusual.The one main improvement that this book could use is more pictures. There are a few full-color photographs in his book but not many, and as such there is likely going to be occasions when a good recipe is missed because it didn’t catch the attention of the reader. While adding more pictures would drive up the cost and expand the mass of this volume, it would be a big value add too.This is a nice book on seasonal and special occasion breads that is well written and well organized, with a good selection of bread recipes. It’s a good choice if you’re looking for a broad collection of recipes that cover most occasions and offer some variety beyond typical loaf and artisan loaves.

This is not your standard bread making book. Despite the fact that many of the recipes call for sourdough starter it is not a sourdough or artisan bread book. The author states that adding sourdough starter makes flavors more complex. You still add yeast although it isn't usually much. It is not an either/or thing. And, she has a special way of preparing the starter you already have which adds many hours to the preparation time.As long as you are prepared to spend a lot of wait time for many of these recipes this book will open the door to many unique types of bread you will want to make. Not every recipe calls for the "starter" method. In fact, there is one recipe called Cinnamon-Sugar Pull-Apart bread that reminds me so much of a coffeecake recipe my mother made for 70 years. This is a relatively quick recipe--just like my mom's.Another thing I really like about this book is that many of the recipes call for ingredients that I actually do have on hand. For example, the Chai-Spiced Star Bread on the cover has many ingredients and all are standard. No weird types of flour or spices you have to go to a unique food store to buy. I am not saying you never have to buy something to make a particular recipe or that all of us have the same things in our cupboards. But, fewer store runs are definitely likely. Still, having the sourdough starter on hand may make ordering this book a "nyet" for some.There is a readable introduction that explains her use of sourdough starter and many other things. Many of them basic. All the recipe ingredient measurements are given in grams and U.S. standard measures. I am trying to get used to the metric measurements and do have a kitchen scale, but I am not there yet so am happy I don't have to do any measurement calculations or look in the back of the book to convert.This book has very few pictures which may bother some people. The author, Jenny Price, does explain how to do the shapes like the Chai Star Bread on the cover, but I have to admit it doesn't look easy. I am going to make it anyway.This is a special book and I think I will take it off the shelf any time I want to make something different.