Baking bliss

There's something special about baking. It's a bit like alchemy - making something out of nothing. The individual elements aren't much on their own, but if you mix them together just right you get something pretty special. I could easily spend a whole day baking, the only problem being that I want to eat it all when I'm done. I love to bake for other people, but since I can't bake for you I'm going to share some of my favourite baking books with you, so maybe you can do a bit of magic yourself.

Miette - The cakes in here are beautiful, but the best part of this book is the European Buttercream recipe. It's not too sweet, and the texture is light and smooth and silky. About half of it is butter though, so like everything it's best in moderation. I made a batch of it last night and flavoured half of the batch raspberry and half with coffee. You can store it in the fridge or freeze it, which is great because it makes a lot and you probably won't use it all at once. It's the perfect icing for something a bit special. Honestly, I could go on about this icing all day. I used the raspberry stuff on a batch of white chocolate cupcakes, which got rave reviews around the office. The cupcakes themselves came from 500 cupcakes, a new discovery but so far I'm impressed.

A treasury of New Zealand baking - I'm slowly but surely working my through all of the recipes in this book. It's wonderful to find such a high quality baking book that comes from New Zealand, so I know that a) I can get all of the ingredients, and b) the measurements and temperatures are metric. And I love the pictures.

The bread bible - A recipe for just about every bread you could ever think of, including a good number of bread-maker versions for the time-poor baker. This has my go-to recipe for pizza dough, and a beautiful orange cinnamon-swirl bread. I don't even mind that it doesn't have any pictures (usually a prerequisite for any recipe book for me), because it all works so well. It is American, but there's a handy little conversion chart in the back for people (like me) who can't think in farenheit.

Cakes & bakes from my mother's kitchen - This is another pretty one, and I wish I'd had time to try more of the recipes from it. The Key lime pie in here is devastatingly good.

Happy baking! If you know of any other great recipe books I'm always on the look-out, so please share them in the comments.