Half Baked Harvest Cookbook: 200+ Quick, Easy and Delicious Recipes for a Healthy Diet

You probably wouldn’t want to bake a cake or a brownie for fear of overcooking or undercooking the ingredients. These half-baked harvest recipes will be your life-savers in the kitchen. Is time a luxury? There are desserts you can whip up in just a few minutes. Just about the time you finish a hearty meal and some lively conversation over dinner, your dessert will be ready to serve. Impress your guests and loved ones with treats so delectable; they will keep asking for more.I know what you’re Isn’t baking a type of cooking? It is, but there are very different skills involved in baking as opposed to more general cooking. Both involve combining edible ingredients; chopping, mixing, and using heat to finish, but baking requires much more precision than cooking.While many people cook by following recipes to a tee, the process of cooking is much more forgiving than baking. An experienced cook can improvise just about every step of the process, eyeballing measurements, testing doneness by sight or touch, and seasoning as they go. Recipes may instruct you to “add a handful of raisins,” “stir occasionally,” or “season to taste.” In cooking, making substitutions on the fly is no big deal. If you’re out of lemons, just use lime juice. Out of white sugar? Use brown. No onions in the pantry? Go ahead and substitute scallions or leeks and so on.Baking, on the other hand, is a more exacting science. Precise measurements, cooking times and temperatures, and doneness cues (signs that your baked goods are done) can spell the difference between success and failure in baking. Substitutions can be trickier—if you run out of baking powder, for instance, you can’t just use baking soda instead.Baking recipes, in general, rely heavily on five categories of Butter, vegetable shortening, oil, cream, cheese.Flavoring Chocolate, fruit, vanilla (and other flavored) extract, spices like cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg. Wheat flours (all-purpose flour, bread flour, pastry flour, cake flour) as well as wheat-free flours like rice flour or almond flourLeavened (things that make baked goods rise): Baking powder, baking soda, eggs, yeast. Granulated sugar, brown sugar, confectioners’ (or powdered) sugar, molasses, honey..Of these ingredients, flour is the one most commonly associated with all sorts of baking—sweet or not. Almost every baking recipe contains some type of flour. This goes for cookies, bars, brownies, cakes, cupcakes, breads, and pastry crusts. They all begin with flour, which gives baked goods their foundation.This book covers the following All-purpose flour is a type of wheat flour that has a moderate level of protein. It’s called “all-purpose” because it can be used successfully for most baked goods. Bread flour is ideal for making bread because it is higher in protein and develops the highest levels of gluten, the substance that gives bread its chewy structure. Flours with lower protein, like pastry flour or the even lower-protein cake flour, are ideal for recipes where you want a light, airy structure, such as cakes and pastry crusts. All-purpose flour falls between bread flour and pastry flour on the protein spectrum and can generally be substituted for either in a pinch.