One Tin Bakes: Sweet and Simple Traybakes, Pies, Bars and Buns

"This is someone you all are probably especially familiar with in the UK, since he was the first winner ever of The Great British Bake Off. This was my pick. I am an extremely passionate baker. I love looking at baking books . And I thought this was such a well done book. It ‘only’ has 70 recipes. Of course, that’s a lot, but you get a lot of cookbooks these days that are just absolutely massive and there are so many recipes, you’re never conceivably going to make your way through them. And sometimes you wonder whether there are too many recipes. Are they all going to be good? But with this book, as soon as I got it, I wanted to make everything in here and I felt like I actually could. There are 70 recipes and I’ve already made about a half-dozen. Everything in here is made in a 9-by-13 inch pan. There’s a lot of simple stuff. There are traybakes, there are cakes and bars. It just shows you the diverse things you can do with this one pan. It’s a workhorse. And it’s kind of homely. It’s just a rectangle, but you can do cakes, cheesecakes, bars. You can do no-bakes, which is one recipe I’m featuring in our holiday cookie issue. The flavors are really good. “I love looking at baking books” I have a lot of admiration for people who write well written recipes and these recipes are extremely well written. They’re descriptive, but not over the top. There’s an economy of language, but one that says everything that you need to know. Kimber is based in London, so he uses the metric weights, which is the baking standard really, even for people here now, but he also includes imperial weights, which is still what a lot of people in America use—pounds and ounces. He does the same for volume. This is a book that I think almost anyone could pick up and make something out of, even if you’re not a really confident baker. Everything I’ve tried has turned out extremely well. There’s a range. Some of them are just one-bowl things. One of the recipes I featured from here is a ‘Dutch baby’, which is a baked pancake. It is so easy. It’s really just flour and eggs and, basically, dump it in a pan and bake it. But then he has things I wouldn’t even have thought you could make using a 9-by-13 inch pan. He has cakes that you can turn into a roll, or where the cake layers are standing vertically in the cake. So, that’s what’s really nice. There’s this whole spectrum, from super-simple to things that are a little more involved, but still achievable."