What's new with Carole:

My latest book is The Essential Baker: The Comprehensive Guide to Baking with Chocolate, Fruit, Nuts, Spices, and other Ingredients, published by John Wiley and Sons, Inc. It was four years of work and I am extremely pleased with it. This is the cover.

Here are some highlights:

• Very comprehensive baking book for novice and experienced bakers--with over 250 recipes.
• Organized by primary ingredients used to bake with--for example, chocolate, nuts, berries, dairy, and spices, etc.
• Several recipes using ingredients that are not so common but really tasty--for example, quince, persimmon, passion fruit, cocoa nibs—and many others.
• Chocolate is one of my specialties (and true loves) so I have a very extensive section on chocolate including dark, milk, white, cocoa, and specialty chocolates (like gaunduia) with tasting charts for dark, milk, white, and cocoa.
• Layout of recipes is very, very easy to use with ingredients listed directly across from the techniques that apply to those ingredients.
• And some absolutely beautiful full page color photos that make you want to bake and bake some more, and taste, of course :). Here are some of the book's photos:

Epicurious.com has selected The Essential Baker as one of the top ten cookbooks of 2007. Here is what they say: "Bloom's more than comprehensive book is based on the notion that in baking, as in cooking, you can't go wrong if you use high-quality ingredients. Her obsessively tested recipes may be simple, but they're far from ordinary. In chapters on milk, grains and nuts, chocolate, and sugar she gives us chèvre goat cheese cake (dairy), pine nut butter cake (nuts), and the world's best brownies. There's even a chapter on vegetable-based sweets such as carrot cake, pumpkin pie, and cornmeal-cranberry muffins. Recipe to try: Malted Milk Chocolate Cheesecake."

Here is what Publishers Weekly says in a starred review: "Bloom, the author of eight cookbooks whose work has appeared inBon Appetit,Gourmet and Food + Wine, adopts an unusual approach in this exhaustive and tantalizing look at baking. Instead of categorizing recipes by food type, she organizes them by primary ingredient-a useful approach for the baker with a craving or surplus of one ingredient. Sections include fruits and vegetables; nuts and seeds; chocolate; dairy products; spices and herbs; and coffee, tea, liqueurs and spirits. The recipes themselves are uniquely formatted in a table layout that lists the ingredients across from their steps to help with organization. Bloom includes a list of equipment needed for the dish along with instructions on storage, streamlining, altering the recipe and recovering from mishaps. The collection covers the gamut with 225 recipes [actually over 250], including such delectable gems as Pear and Walnut Layer Cake with Maple-Cream Cheese Icing; Coconut Biscotti; and Cranberry Nut Tea Loaf. Other highlights range from Chocolate Chip Cookies and Macadamia Nut Blondies to Malted Milk Chocolate Cheesecake and Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting. Bloom also provides valuable instruction in sections on essential ingredients, equipment and supplies, and techniques. 20 full-color photos."

And here is what The Assoiated Press says: "Successful baking is the result of carefully mixing equal parts science and passion- a balancing of flour and fat ratios with the sweet joy of creation. Sadly, too few cookbook authors manage this delicate blend, producing instead either tedious textbooks or gushy remembrances of pies past. Neither does much for getting great goodies onto your table. This year we are lucky to get two masterful takes on baking, books that deserve to be dog-eared, speckled with flour and spattered with batter. First is Carole Bloom's The Essential Baker, an exhaustive (265 recipes) and intuitive book pros and novices alike will be comfortable with. The author's simple, evocative prose makes it hard not to be drawn to the recipes. But the brilliance of this book is its structure. The recipes are sorted according to key ingredients. The Fruit and Vegetable section is divided in chapters on stone fruits, dried fruits, berries and grapes, for example. In recent years more cookbooks have adopted this approach (and even more should), which syncs so much better with how real people cook than more traditional approaches to organizing recipes. Bloom's recipe structure also is excellent, favoring a ``Joy of Cooking'' style that meshes the ingredient list with the method (rather than the more common list of ingredients followed by the instructions). Some readers may initially find the recipes visually intimidating, but Bloom's deft hand at guiding the reader through the recipe ensures success. Proof of that is her recipe for Devilish Chocolate Layer Cake with Caramel-chocolate Buttercream, a complex five-page recipe that despite its many steps was clear and easy to follow. It also was remarkably good. Bloom's recipe for gingerbread produced a simple, moist and delicious cake-like bread, and the cardamom and pear crisp is a great fall dish."