Of my 1,000-volume cookbook collection, only about 25 merit spots on my kitchen bookshelf. Among the longest-tenured residents on that prized piece of real estate are two trusted baking bibles written by the team at King Arthur Baking. With the September publication of its first cookbook just for kids, Sweet & Salty! King Arthur Baking Company’s Cookbook for Young Bakers, the Norwich company is now hoping to seed similar devotion in a younger set.
Capitalizing on enthusiasm for shows like the family-friendly “Great British Baking Show” and “Kids Baking Championship,” the new book provides almost 100 recipes, categorized as either easy, medium or “project.” King Arthur’s baking experts provide clear explanations and extra tips for novices. Bright photographs feature beaming bakers in its 8- to 12-year-old target demographic.
When I first flipped through a copy last fall, I experienced my standard new-cookbook problem: I wanted to immediately pull out bowls, whisks and ingredients and make almost every recipe. A super-size peanut butter cup tart with a cornflake-crunchy filling, banoffee pie in a graham cracker crust, sharp cheddar cheese “not-its” and pizza party buns — yes, please!
Hold on, I thought, I’m not the audience for this cookbook. So I decided to ask some Vermont kids if their mouths watered at the thought of lemon pudding cake or loaded baked potato waffles — and if the recipes lived up to their promise.
It was not hard to find volunteers, who each picked at least one recipe from the book. Overall, six young testers — and their in-house support staff — found recipes from Sweet & Salty! to be reliable and delicious, with a couple of disappointing exceptions.
The Whitham-White family of Jericho are big chocolate fans; mom Clover Whitham told me her “house cake” recipe is King Arthur’s Original Cake Pan Cake. She started making the easy, and incidentally vegan, chocolate cake when her 10-year-old twins, Bodhi and Ronin White, were born. “We had a lot of visitors, and I was always hungry,” Whitham said.
I could really understand what was going on.
Bodhi White, 10
The twins chose to bake the Sweet & Salty! version of that recipe: the Simplest Chocolate Cake, which their mom said they made with minimal help. “I could really understand what was going on and how much stuff to put in,” Bodhi said. The result was so good, he added, “I would probably make it a thousand times more.”
The twins’ brother, Jackson, 12, picked the giant chocolate chip cookie. The recipe was easy to follow, he said, and he needed assistance only to separate the egg. The resulting cast-iron skillet-baked cookie was a gastronomic success, if not a lesson in brotherly sharing.
“I wish I had the whole cookie to myself,” Ronin lamented.
Whitham, who owns a kitchen scale, said she appreciated that the cookbook provides weights for most ingredients. She’s found that for her kids, the scale is an easier and less messy measuring technique than cups, which vary surprisingly in capacity and hold different amounts of some ingredients, depending how they are filled. As noted in Sweet & Salty!’s “Ten Quick Lessons for Baking Success,” a scale is far more precise, which can help avoid disappointment in less forgiving recipes.
That may have been part of the issue with two frustrating bakes by 10-year-old Claire Tennis of South Burlington. Claire was familiar with empanadas and excited to make them following one of the cookbook’s more complex “project”-level recipes. Unfortunately, the rather lengthy called-for 5-minute knead of a fairly dry pastry dough required not only a parental ringer but also, I think, contributed to the baked empanadas being “hard as rocks,” as Claire’s mom, Laurie Fisher, reported. They also ran short of filling, though the family found the mixture tasty.
Armed with this knowledge, I made the empanadas, with better results. I weighed the flour and found the correct amount was almost half a cup less than as measured by volume. I also reduced the 5-minute knead, which, on top of possibly using too much flour, I surmised might have been to blame for Claire’s tough empanadas. Instead, I kneaded the dough briefly, just until it came together, as I typically do with this kind of pastry. I agree that the amount of filling is a bit stingy and recommend making about 25 percent more. Be sure though, as the recipe advises, not to overfill each empanada.
Claire also tried two lemony cake recipes. She said the pink lemonade cake, labeled “easy,” was not especially hard, but it took more than three hours from start to finish and had so many steps that it began to “feel like a chore,” according to her mom. The cake also came out dry — possibly a too-much-flour problem — though Claire did enjoy its citrusy glaze tinted with raspberry juice. Happily, she really liked the lemon pudding cake she made, which magically separates when baking into layers of soft lemon curd and fluffy cake.
Two more recipe tests yielded similar happiness, along with a sense of accomplishment. Twelve-year-old Levi McMurry of Burlington made the yeasted naan recipe, which his mother, Grace Per Lee, said worked perfectly with a couple of substitutions: avocado oil for butter and 100 percent all-purpose flour instead of a mix of that and bread flour.
Levi proudly deemed his homemade Indian flatbread “delicious,” and his 9-year-old brother, George, gave it an enthusiastic five-star rating.
In Hinesburg, Nell Goldstein and her mom, Katie Warchut, celebrated Nell’s eighth birthday with a successful team test of Doughnut Muffins. They picked the recipe, Warchut said, “because it was easy and we had all the ingredients — plus we love muffins and donuts.” The muffins, Warchut reported, met all of the birthday girl’s expectations, especially after their tops were dipped in melted butter and then cinnamon sugar.
As the judges on the “Great British Baking Show” like to say: a nice bake indeed. ➆
Sweet & Salty! King Arthur Baking Company’s Cookbook for Young Bakers by Jessica Battilana with Yekaterina Boytsova, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 280 pages. $21.99. Learn more at kingarthurbaking.com.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Nice Bakes | Six young Vermonters put King Arthur’s new Sweet & Salty! kids’ cookbook to the test”
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