A Collection of Fine Baking: The Recipes of Young Mo Kim
Fancy bakeries in the Far East often fill their display cases with delicacies as intricate as Faberge eggs. These treats are meant to be visual delights as much as gustatory ones; complicated constructions of meringue, gelatin and cream, they look better than they taste. Kim, the current president of the Korean Bakers Association, wants to make these ornate goodies accessible to the home cook, but what home cook would be interested in a chocolate layer cake that requires 20 steps? Replete with a "genoise chart," and recipes for five types of pastry cream, this cookbook is not for the amateur. Strawberry Pear Pudding demands more than an hour of concentrated effort; Double Chocolate Mousse Cake requires more than two. While the technique behind many of these recipes is French, the guiding spirit of the book is Asian: bizarre cartoon characters decorate the pages, and the prose has the stiff, slightly forced syntax of English in translation. However, for a cook with a sweet tooth, a fully-stocked kitchen and a lot of endurance, these well-photographed recipes might delight, or at the very least intrigue.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.