Bourke Street Bakery: All Things Sweet: Unbeatable recipes from the iconic bakery

Anybody can find a recipe for brownies these days, but can you guarantee that it will use the best possible ingredients to make the chocolate brownies of your dreams? Paul Allam and David McGuinness’ Bourke Street Bakery: All Things Sweet​ is not just any cookbook, but the baking book you need on your kitchen shelf to create the most incredible pastries, cakes, tarts, cookies and confectionery imaginable.

Representing years of testing, adapting and refining of the recipes, Bourke Street Bakery: All Things Sweet is comprised of ten chapters (Cakes and Muffins; Cookies and Biscuits; Sweets; Sweet Pastry Doughs; Tarts; Sweet, Sweet Pies; Puff Pastries; Choux Pastries; Croissant Pastries; Brioche and Sweet Breads) of delicious recipes that promise to deliver the very best results, using the very best ingredients. Whip up a Flourless Mocha and Hazelnut Cake for that charity bake sale and grab an Apple, Bran and Sour Cherry Muffin as you run out the door for breakfast. Impress your guests at your dinner party with Ginger brulee tarts and top off that Sunday lunch with Pain au chocolat bread and butter pudding. Complete the kid’s party table with Marshmallows and Rocky Road and get festive with Gingerbread men biscuits, Christmas fruit mince pies and Christmas cake.

Complete with advice, tools, step-by-step photography and trouble-shooters, Bourke Street Bakery: All Things Sweet is the must-have comprehensive baking guide for every occasion.

From the Publisher

Introduction: sweets and treats

All Things Sweet has proved to be a sweet journey for us that’s extended well beyond the recipes you’ll try your hand at in this book. It’s now ten years since we published our first book, Bourke Street Bakery, and just over ten years since we opened our first little bakery café on Bourke Street in Sydney. That little corner café in Surry Hills has now grown to eleven stores scattered around the city. We have baked so many different tarts and cakes, biscuits and breads, pies and sweets over the years that we sometimes joke that our dreams are dusted with flour and flavoured with cinnamon sugar.

As Bourke Street Bakery has grown, so too have our families. Every year there are more little feet padding about, and more cheeky faces craving goodies to satisfy their sweet teeth. We would find ourselves at our children’s birthday parties serving the Bourke Street Bakery classics, such as carrot cake and chocolate tarts, but the kids wanted all things sweet.

Contents of Bourke Street Bakery: All Things Sweet: Unbeatable recipes from the iconic bakery

Chapter one: Cakes & muffins

If you’re not very experienced at baking, or want to whip up something quick and easy for afternoon tea, the simple sponges at the start of this chapter are the ones for you — and we’ve even provided some easy mousses and buttercream fillings to jazz them up.

Of course, we couldn’t have a book without our ‘golden oldie’ Bourke Street Bakery classics, such as our flourless chocolate cake and carrot cake, and the muffins at the end of the chapter.

We’ve also included a few of our latest romances — a Persian-inspired love cake, and our take on a French marjolaine.

Chapter two: Cookies & biscuits

This chapter is rather long — but believe it or not, we actually had to cut it back! There are so many delicious cookies and biscuits to choose from, we felt we could almost write a whole recipe book on them alone, so here is the abridged version of the Bourke Street Bakery favourites over the years.

Cookies and biscuits are everyone’s favourites, and while they may seem like a simpler thing for a novice baker to tackle, you still have to behave a little like a quasi-scientist when making them.

Chapter three: Sweets

This chapter should really be called ‘Mixed Lollies for Grown-ups’! Here you’ll find chocolate truffles, jubes, marshmallows, rocky road, chocolate honeycomb and some seriously large meringues that won’t fit into any mixed lolly bag.

Did we mention these sweets were developed with our kids in mind – but it turns out they won the hearts of adults even more?

Contents of Bourke Street Bakery: All Things Sweet: Unbeatable recipes from the iconic bakery

Chapter four: Sweet pastry doughs

Many things can go wrong when making and baking pastry: it’s not all that unusual for our own attempts to end up in the bin. Persevere and try to be aware of what went wrong, and don’t be too worried about what it looks like — short of burning the pastry or having the pastry shell completely break, the result is bound to be tasty, so push ahead.

The following methods and explanations for mixing, rolling and lining dough are the ones we have adapted at the bakery to suit these recipes.

Chapter five: Tarts

We love tarts at Bourke Street Bakery because they allow us to be consistent, yet versatile. There seems to be an endless variety of tarts we can create to keep our pastry chefs and customers satisfied, depending on the seasons and availability of produce.

Here are some of the ones we’ve enjoyed making and eating over the years. We’re sure you can develop some of your own delicious creations too, once you have the basics down pat.

Chapter six : Sweet, sweet pies

There’s something homely and timeless about apple pie. Who doesn’t love a steaming hot apple pie with a scoop of homemade vanilla ice cream melting on top, or a dollop of thickened cream?

Starring apples, rhubarb, blackberries and quince, the pies in this chapter are glorious at the height of autumn when the weather turns cool, but at other times of year you can, of course, experiment with other seasonal fruits.

Chapter seven: Puff pastries

We cannot emphasise enough that good puff pastry should be light and flaky. ‘Laminating’ — where you layer the pastry butter and dough repeatedly — is a crucial element to master. Carefully following (and practising!) the laminating directions is essential, because this is where things can really fall apart. You need an unusual mixture of precision, patience and speed when laminating. Unfortunately there is no room for error here.

Okay, so take a deep breath and go for it… what’s the worst that can happen? You throw it away and start again. All good bakers have done that plenty of times before they created a puff pastry masterpiece!

Chapter eight: Choux pastries

Once you’ve mastered choux pastry, you can make cream puffs, éclairs and profiteroles, or even croquembouches. ‘Yum!’ I hear you cry…

Choux is a delicious light pastry dough, but there is an entirely different technique involved in making it than with the other classic pastries you may have worked with. You have to time things perfectly — especially the beating and incorporating of the eggs.

Choux pastry is enormously versatile and a great carrier for flavours. Have fun and play around with the fillings and glazes in this chapter. Throw some roasted nuts in and go wild!

Chapter nine: Croissant pastries

Mantra #1: Use the best possible ingredients. French Lescure butter or European-style cultured butter will result in superb results.

Mantra #2: Good things take time. Allow your dough to prove slowly. This also applies when ‘laminating’ pastry — careful, precise folding of the dough will create layers of perfectly thin, flaky pastry.

Mantra #3: Bake it well. After all your hard work, you want your pastries to be a beautiful deep-copper colour, which also enriches their flavour, adding a subtle hint of caramel.

Chapter ten: Brioche & sweet breads

Buttery, pillowy, soft brioche and mouthwatering kugelhopf are what a lazy weekend brunch calls for. These doughs are rich, soft, delicate and decadent, and if you’ve never made bread before, they can be mastered rather quickly compared to sourdough, which can take years to perfect.

There are a few other recipes in this chapter that are not actually from the yeasted dough family, such as the banana bread and pain d’épices, which are commonly considered loaves — even though they are cakes disguised as loaves.

You only live once, right? So just enjoy!

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Murdoch Books (Oct. 16 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 312 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1743369328
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1743369326
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 1.42 kg
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 19.69 x 3.18 x 26.04 cm