Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This was one of those books that actually angered me. In the introduction, they go out of their way to explain to you why mass measurements are superior to volume measurements, but then go ahead and supply volume only measurements for all of their recipes. This is unacceptable. It's one thing to find "American" style measurements in a casual chocolate chip cookie book, but for a large expensive baking book supposedly written by professionals, it behooves them to include mass measurements for serious home bakers. But the real reason I disliked this book was that the recipes I tried simply did not work as advertised. The challah recipe was not a standard recipe; it seemed extremely large for a single loaf, the mixing technique was not like what I had encountered in amateur and professional books before, but I perservered and followed the directions fastidiously. The loaf was edible, but otherwise a failure. The fact that there is no explanation for this, and no anticipation of the problems I encountered is unacceptable. I have made dozens of challah recipes and I never had a problem before. Usually, when something goes wrong, I blame myself. I can tell when I have made a mistake and I take responsibility for my failures. This was one of those times where I blamed the recipe. This was just an odd ball recipe. Similarly, the mudslide cookies did not work as the recipe stated they would. How hard is it to make a simple cookie recipe function properly? In the end, I managed to salvage these cookies through ingenuity and improvisation, but that's no excuse; careful faithfulness to the recipe should yield perfect results. Again, no explanation or attempt to anticipate such problems. That was the last time I wasted my time with this book. Do yourself a favor and instead of buying this expensive paper weight, get yourself one of Pierre Herme's books, or Bo Friberg's Professional Pastry chef.