Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

**see update below, this cookbook has multiple typos as admitted by the author** I love Claire. I love this cookbook. I hate this cookbook. At times I’ve questioned if there was a numerical typo in the amounts of ingredients or bake times. As a fellow pastry chef, I appreciate the effort and time it takes to develop recipes. As a home baker I appreciate all the extra visual cues she gives and specific instructions (whisk vigorously for 45 seconds, stir until thick and glossy, etc). But this cookbook sells itself as helping the every-man grow more confident in baking. To understand the why and the how instead of just following steps. It just falls so far short of that. The recipes bake like they were in mid-testing and the publishing deadline came so they ran with it. I’ve never followed a recipe so precisely only to end up with lackluster results every time. Definitely read the beginning of the cookbook where Claire explains that you may need to add a few extra minutes..or fifteen or twenty, to the bake time. Every oven is different. True, but if brownies take 25-30 minutes in your oven but 45 in mine (to still be ‘medium rare’ as she says), that’s a pretty wide range. After all the recipe testing, *that* is the recipe you landed on to turn non dessert people into dessert people? One that, even if the recipe is followed exactly (I used the weighted measurements rather than measuring cups) the results are wildly unpredictable? I bake a lot and the bake times in other recipes I make vary by maybe a few minutes in either direction. I’m not faulting my oven here. Every recipe I’ve made out of Dessert Person needs extra time. Often a lot of extra time. Even following the time suggestion AND all the visual/textile clues Claire gives (surface shiny and puffed, soft but firm when pressed, etc) to indicate doneness, the final product is often almost inedibly raw. The coffee coffee cake? After 45 minutes and easily $10 in ingredients, it looked like she described it should look, toothpick was clean, and it jiggled slightly (which I found odd for a properly baked coffee cake to jiggle, but I digress..) so I took it out of the oven. The center collapsed as it cooled, indicating an underbake. After it cooled and I tried to slice it, it’s almost *raw* in the center. At that point it’s not like you can stick a cooled cake bake back in the oven to finish cooking. So half the recipe is friggin delicious, but the center half is ruined and raw. All accomplished while following every single indicator and time suggestion given. Awesome. The flavors though? SO GOOD. I wish the results were as good. Overall, I’d rather chuck this cookbook across the room than anything else. But the banana bread recipe is perfection so.. If you like following a recipe exactly and having it not turn out, buy this book. If you like wasting a lot of time and ingredients making the same recipe over and over and over trying to get it to even come out remotely right, this is the book for you. If you enjoy fussy recipes that are delicious but tedious and exacting to make, buy this cookbook. If you just want to read it and look at the pictures, buy it. Otherwise, it’s an expensive, expansive letdown. UPDATE: I’m removing another star from my original review. Seriously considering dropping it to one star. I just watched a video Claire Saffitz made showing her making her Forever Brownies. She admits they’ve found FOUR typos in the book (so far) including the brownie recipe. In the video she also bakes the brownies at a higher temperature and for longer than her own cookbook instructs. Sorry but if the author of the cookbook has to go off-recipe to get the proper results and you have typos in the dang ingredient quantities, the cookbook sucks. I’d return this if I could but it’s all covered in food dribbles and angry tears of frustration. Best advice I can give when using this cookbook is to take what Claire says with a grain of Diamond! always Diamond! kosher salt and trust your gut, not this cookbook, about whether something is fully baked or not. Buying this book is one of my biggest regrets of 2021 so far.