Little Flower Baking

by Christine Moore (Text by), Staci Valentine (Photographer), Cecilia Leung (Contribution by)

Overview

“When you eat Christine Moore's food, you feel happy and well served by life.”
— Jonathan Gold, Pulitzer Prize–winning food writer, Los Angeles Times

One of California's most acclaimed bakers is sharing her very best recipes, all adapted and carefully tested for the home cook. Extensively photographed and rich with Christine Moore's down-home warmth and wisdom, it inspires home cooks to make her rustically beautiful, always delicious cookies, cakes, pastries, savory baked goods, breads, rolls, bars, puddings, and so much more. Little Flower Baking is beautifully packaged, and every recipe has its own gorgeous photo—a rarity in cookbooks, and a great boon for the home baker.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938849602
Publisher:	TURNER PUB CO
Publication date:	04/12/2016
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	8.10(w) x 10.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Christine Moore is the owner of the Little Flower Candy Co. and the chef/owner of Little Flower cafe and Lincoln restaurant, both in Pasadena, California. A pastry chef who trained in Paris and Los Angeles, Moore is also author of Little Flower: Recipes from the Cafe, which was one of Food52's 16 Best Cookbooks of 2012 and won praise from Jonathan Gold, David Lebovitz, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. She sells her candy nationwide and has developed a passionate following for her simple, exceptionally flavorful baked goods and cafe food at both restaurants.

Co-author Cecilia Leung baked at Spago, JiRaffe, and Grace. Los Angeles–based photographer Staci Valentine has also photographed such books as The Seasonal Jewish Kitchen, Das Cookbook, Tomatomania, and Masumoto: Perfect Peach. Photo stylist Jeanne Kelley is the author of several cookbooks, including The Portable Feast, Kitchen Garden, and Blue Eggs and Yellow Tomatoes.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction
For the Love of Baking
Blondies with spiced gumdrops (my favorite childhood pastry invention)… Rice Krispie treats with double marshmallow… rugelach made with scrap pie dough. The signs were all there.

“Do what you loved as a child.” I’ll never forget when someone said that to me when I was in my twenties, waiting tables.

Baking was something I loved. And when I was a kid, I used to write a menu for my mom before I brought in breakfast in bed. What kid does that? I’ll tell you: one destined to serve. I wasn’t a great brain in school; I actually never really liked school. I had wonderful friends and was good at sports, but I didn’t follow the path that my friends did. The restaurant business turned out to be a safe place for a kid like me to land. It was a family of sorts, with all kinds of misfits, dropouts, and underachievers waiting to overachieve (which many did while we were waiting tables together). I’ve always felt very lucky to be in this community of hard-working people who feed others and are nice to them. In other words, hospitality professionals.

And that’s what I became. Serving makes me feel good. It’s who I am. Feeding people is a true honor. I tell my staff that we have more than 200 opportunities a day to make someone happy. That’s a gift.

In my late twenties, after years in Los Angeles of waiting tables, managing restaurants, and catering, I finally decided to go to the back of the house and do what I loved as a child: bake. I took a few extension courses and was inspired by a teacher who had lived in France. I’d always dreamed of living there.

And then, when I was twenty-eight, a tragedy woke me up to the power of NOW. My dearest friend, Vonnie, died in a car accident. She was like a sister, and her stunning, unfathomable death both crushed me and made me realize how precious life is. How easy it was to die. It could happen. It did happen.

I was on a plane to Paris within a month. I knew no French, knew no one there, and had no plans other than a reservation for a hotel room for just three days, but I was ready to bite the apple of life. My ignorance really was bliss, and that year in Paris changed the course of my life. It made me rethink who I thought I was, and led me to realize who I really was and what I wanted. I owed all this to Vonnie.

I met a fantastic friend my first day there. He was working at Le Bioux, a wine shop across from my hotel, La Louisianne on rue de Seine in the 6th. After spending my first day walking the city, too petrified to speak to anyone, I went into the wine shop and said basically the only thing I knew how to say in French: “Je m’appelle Christine.” The shopkeeper burst out laughing and said, in perfect English, “Do you always introduce yourself when you walk into a shop?” Hooray, I thought, he’s American! Juan Semilla and I have been lifelong friends since that moment.

Juan helped me get my stage at Gérard Mulot. He opened his home, cooked for me, and taught me how tremendous a man could be. I will be forever grateful to you, Juan, for how you guided me and watched over me.

Surviving in a foreign country is not as romantic as it seems in the movies. I had a very limited amount of money saved, and kitchen work in Paris is tough. Working in that kitchen made me realize how incredibly easy we have it in the States. We’d go to work at 5 a.m., when it was dark out, and work until 7 p.m., when it was dark out again. (And the entire crew had to peel many cases of apples before we left each day.) Not seeing the sun for days plays tricks on your mind, especially this adopted daughter of California.

And yet I was so lucky to be able to work in Monsieur Mulot’s kitchen. He was a formidable chef. The pastries, breads, and chocolates that he and his crew produced were, in my opinion, the best in the city. The smells of that kitchen will stay with me forever. On my most recent visit, I walked into his patisserie and tears welled up. The aroma of his beautiful work is very emotional for me. It was twenty-five years ago, and it still feels like yesterday. Thank you, Monsieur Mulot.

... to be continued

Table of Contents

For the Love of Baking
Mise en Place
Pastries
Cakes, Tarts & Pies
Cookies
Savories
Sweets

Editorial Reviews

Winner, Southern California Independent Booksellers Award & PubWest Design Award

"Impress the hell out of everyone without even having to set an alarm. Make ahead, chill, and wake up the house with the smell of delicious baking."
— Lucky Peach

"Little Flower Baking is a 260-plus-page reminder that nobody does cakes, pies, cookies—you name it—quite like she does. If you need us, we'll be licking turmeric-orange glaze off our beaters."
— Los Angeles Magazine

"What a fabulous treat! I've always admired Christine's knack for making recipes that are both comforting and inspired. This is the book to use for updated baking essentials, full of secrets that are simple, straightforward, and delicious."
— Sherry Yard, owner/chef of the Helms Bakery and author of Desserts by the Yard and The Secrets of Baking

"Reading these pages is like sitting with Christine for a cup of coffee. I can hear her voice in every hearty potato bacon biscuit, in how she tells us to make an earnest sauce out of sea salt caramels, and in the practical ways she suggests to swap one ingredient for the other when the season calls for it. Few bakers can translate their pastries into words with the richness that Christine and Cecilia have in this cookbook. This is the kind of book that finds a home on the kitchen counter, collecting stains from sticky fingers or splattering pots of fruit, with many of its pages marked and handwritten notes on the sidelines."
— Roxana Jullapat, owner/baker, Friends + Family

"It's no surprise that Christine Moore's Little Flower Baking is just like her, straightforward and enormously appealing—always figuring out a way to teach or be of service, and ultimately luscious without being precious in any way. I want to bake my way through these recipes from the first to the last."
— Evan Kleiman, host of Good Food on KCRW/NPR

"When you eat Christine Moore's food, you feel happy and well served by life."
— Jonathan Gold, Pulitzer Prize–winning food writer, Los Angeles Times

“Christine Moore is one of California’s best bakers, and this cookbook is one of the best. Every recipe has a photo, and every treat is as good as the next.”
— Food & Wine

From the Publisher

04/15/2016
In her follow-up to Little Flower: Recipes from the Cafe, Paris-trained pastry chef Moore presents sweet and savory recipes from her restaurants Little Flower Cafe and Lincoln, both in Pasadena, CA. Intermediate to advanced bakers who have worked their way through other California bakery cookbooks such as Elisabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson's Tartine, Zoe Nathan and Matt Armendariz's Huckleberry, and Valerie Gordon's Sweet will delight in tackling multicomponent recipes such as milk and honey cake, tomato ricotta cake, chicken pot pies, and pink peppercorn hibiscus shortbread. Though stunning visually, this cookbook can frustrate. For instance, the index entry for "caramels" points to four instances of the same recipe for salted caramel sauce, in which premade salted caramels (no recipe provided) are melted in warm cream. Presumably Moore wants readers to purchase them directly from Little Flower. VERDICT Recommended for regional baking collections.

Library Journal