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Indulge: 100 Perfect Desserts | 
 enlarge | Author: Claire Clark
Creator: Thomas Keller
Publisher: Whitecap Books
List Price: $40.00
Buy New: $26.40
You Save: $13.60 (34%)
Rating:  11 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 240
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.4
Dimensions (in): 10.2 x 8.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 1552859096
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.86
EAN: 9781552859094
ASIN: 1552859096
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
Learn to craft desserts from a master pâtissier. Claire Clark is the pastry chef at The French Laundry (Napa Valley in California), one of America's most renowned restaurants. Its innovative and creative menus always deliver the highest standards of quality and great taste. Its celebrated desserts, made by Clark, are nothing short of remarkable. Indulge is a collection of Claire Clark's favorites dishes that any home chef can re-create. Perfectly decadent, the recipes in this new cookbook range from the deceptively simple to the more exotic. Included are cookies, cakes, pastries, mousses, ices, meringues, custards and creams, and more. Clark's down-to-earth writing style demystifies such sumptuous sweets as: - Red wine and chocolate cake
- Bitter chocolate, praline brûlée and espresso torte
- Orange and pistachio semolina cake
- Fig and blueberry and créme fraîche tart
- Rich chocolate ganache tart with salted caramel and candied peanuts
- Tropical fruit Pavlova
- Mango, ginger and lime sorbet.
Along with the recipes there are valuable tips and techniques learned during Claire Clark's 20 years as a pastry chef in world famous restaurants.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
 TOO DIFFICULT August 18, 2008
foodiefuddie (Erie, PA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I am a very good home cook and baker, but this is a book for a professional chef. I showed it to several other "good home cooks and bakers" and they all thought that it would be too time consuming and difficult to make the recipes. The vocabulary was esoteric, known only to a professional dessert chef.
A BRITISH APPROACH TO FRENCH PASTRY May 12, 2008
C. Terzis (Nicosia Cyprus)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
There is something 'different' when a british pastry chef writes a pastry book. It is maybe the marriage of Anglosaxon conservatism and tradition with French flair and influences in pastry that makes the British pastry chef to just create!
This book continues the line of good British pastry books like the ones by Gary Rhodes, Gordon Ramsey and others.
The recipes are in both Metric and Imperial and the temperatures in both Celsius and Fahrenheit.
Recipes range from simple to elaborate and they include gingerbread cake, orange pistachio syrup cake, battenburg, bakewell tart, lemon tart, jalousie, meringues, creme caramel, mousses including a baked chocolate mousse, jellies puddings and ice cream among many others. I find the best section of the book to be the Cookie/Biscuit chapter. I particularly like the shortbread recipe.
This book would do for an amateur baker but not all recipes are approachable.
Most of the recipes are for restaurant not pastry shop desserts.
The author gives sufficient intructions at the beggining of each chapter and of each recipe to facilitate any user. There are tips on the side of every recipe, with extra instructions, suggestions or variations.
The decoration of the finished products is a marriage between British conservatism and French modernism, that is it's not as bad as the British and not as good as the French, but it is good none the less.
Many of the combinations are too weird for my taste eg 'Spiced pumpkin custard with orange infused granola', but that's just my taste and this is my review.
One thing that put me off a bit is the general atmosphere of elevating the author, that makes itself felt throughout the book. To quote the backcover flap, describing the author: "...where she established herself as one of the world's greatest pastry chefs." In the continent, you can get pastry chefs of this level a dime a dozen.
All in all, this is a good book at a good price and I am not sorry that I bought it.
don't believe the French Laundry hype April 5, 2008
pastry girl (san francisco)
7 out of 9 found this review helpful
100 Perfect Desserts? No, more like some cookies, some British stuff, and two or three new ideas. I'm sure Ms. Clark is many times more skilled and successful than I'll ever be, but I was disappointed in this book. I was hoping for French Laundry plated desserts, with multiple components, intrigue, complexity. The recipes mostly look good (except for pink-and yellow food coloring cake), but honestly the thing I'm most interested in making is a dessert the chef is pictured plating, but is not in the book. She has been at the Laundry for only 2 or 3 years, long enough to earn use of the name, but I think it is deceptive to use the restaurant name so prominently.
 you will need a metric scale March 7, 2008
PLF (Berkeley)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book presents formal, restaurant style desserts. Most of the desserts are ones I have in other cookbooks, with slight variations. The book was written for British readers and thus the ingredient amounts, given in weights, are not easily measured by an American scale--i.e. recipes that need 1.75 cups of flour. There are some nice photographs and some detailed instructions for pastry making techniques, so I could imagine some cooks being challenged and satisfied with this cookbook, especially if they own a metric scale.
 This is it. March 3, 2008
Armansmom (Portland Oregon)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Im an avid baker and so far I have tried the carrot cupcakes ,brownies , scones ,and short bread cookies and everything turned out fantastic and got a lot of compliments.
I would say this is one of the best baking books I own and im looking forward to trying more recipes from this wonderful collection .
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