Barefoot Contessa Foolproof: Recipes You Can Trust Author: Visit Amazon's Ina Garten Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0307464873 | Format: PDF
Barefoot Contessa Foolproof: Recipes You Can Trust Description
Amazon.com Review
Featured Recipe from Ina Garten: Sticky Toffee Date Cake with Bourbon Glaze
Makes 1 cake
For the cake
- ¾ pound dates, pitted and chopped
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- ¼ pound (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature
- ¹⁄³ cup granulated sugar
- 2 extra-large eggs, at room temperature
- 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
- 1¼ cups all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon kosher salt
- 1½ tablespoons baking powder
For the sauce
- 12 tablespoons (1½ sticks) unsalted butter
- 1 cup light brown sugar, lightly packed
- ½ cup heavy cream
- ¼ teaspoon kosher salt
- 2 tablespoons good bourbon, such as Maker's Mark
- 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
- Sweetened whipped cream, for serving
Directions
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter and flour a 9 x 2-inch round cake pan.
Place the dates in a deep saucepan with 1¾ cups of water. Bring to boil, stirring a little to break up the dates. Allow to simmer for 1 minute. Off the heat, stir in the baking soda (it will bubble up!). Set aside.
Meanwhile, in an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream the butter and granulated sugar on medium speed for 3 minutes, until light and fluffy. With the mixer on low, add the eggs, one at a time, and then the vanilla, scraping down the bowl. (The mixture may look curdled.) Combine the flour and salt and, with the mixer still on low, slowly add it to the batter. With the mixer on low, add the hot date mixture in two batches to the batter, scraping down the bowl. The batter will be runny but don't worry! Stir in the baking powder, which will also bubble up. Pour into the prepared pan. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
Meanwhile, combine the butter, brown sugar, heavy cream, and salt in a medium saucepan and bring to boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for 1 minute. Off the heat, stir in the bourbon and vanilla and pour into a 2-cup heat-proof glass measuring cup. Set aside. As soon as the cake is done, poke holes all over it with a toothpick. Pour three-quarters of the sauce evenly over the cake while still warm and allow it to soak in for 30 minutes. Turn the cake out bottom side up onto a flat serving plate and pour the remaining sauce on top. Cool completely.
Serve at room temperature with sweetened whipped cream.
From Booklist
How many magazine, newspaper, and book recipes have resulted in major dining disasters, or at least less-than-optimum visual and tasty delights? Not content to rely on titles alone, nationally known cook and TV host Garten, aka the Barefoot Contessa, carefully counsels reader-chefs on turning out perfect dishes and menus every time. Each page, if not featuring a list of foolproof techniques and tips, includes all the right directions as well as photographs. Just a sampling of the ideas that make her 100 dishes work: freeze cookie dough but not already baked cookies; when a dish specifies fleur de sel, don’t use kosher salt; avoid serving appetizers on Thanksgiving, but do cook in abundance, so that guests go home with leftovers. Her treats, as always (and like her packaged mixes), are stomach pleasers: mustard and gruyère batons, lobster mac and cheese, salted caramel brownies, and cinnamon baked donuts, among others. --Barbara Jacobs
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- Hardcover: 272 pages
- Publisher: Clarkson Potter; First Edition first Printing edition (October 30, 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 9780307464873
- ISBN-13: 978-0307464873
- ASIN: 0307464873
- Product Dimensions: 10.1 x 7.9 x 1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
I own all of Ina Garten's cookbooks. I am amazed by how simple she makes cooking seem and every year around Thanksgiving, I start sorting through her recipes and planning my Thanksgiving menu. She delivers top notch results without much fuss, and I think she is probably my favorite long time Food Network personality.
Foolproof is a cookbook that seems to revolve around mistake proof entertaining. When Ina says "foolproof" she doesn't mean a recipe has only five ingredients or that it has only three steps. Ina means she has an ingredient list with easily obtainable ingredients and steps that appeal to your common sense so that you don't worry about whether the recipe will turn out. She tells you what to look for so that you know when each recipe is perfectly done.
She lists ten foolproof tips for cooking. Other chapters include: cocktails; starters; lunch; dinner; vegetables; and desserts. She also gives you 12 foolproof tips for table settings with photographs which help you out if, like me, making a table setting look polished but simple is something you need a little help with. She finishes the book with a foolproof index of menus for special occasions which cross references with special dishes from all of her cookbooks.
She does repeat foolproof recipes from her previous books such as her standard chicken stock, but the book is mostly comprised of new material. I have seen some complaints that some of her ingredients are just too much of a splurge. I like to look at her recipes from a couple of perspectives. She lives in the Hamptons, and ingredients such as lobster are a local, easy-to-obtain natural part of her repertoire. Also, these recipes seem to mostly have an emphasis on entertaining and many of us don't mind splurging a little for a special occasion.
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