Quick Easy Dessert Recipes

Reading about the ins and outs of baking the perfect, flaky pie crust is a little like reading about how to achieve the perfect golf swing: the proof is in the doing. And it often takes a remarkably intuitive reader to understand exactly what the author is getting at. Not so the work of Rose Levy Beranbaum, the author who gave us The Cake Bible. If ever there was a cookbook author who could place her hands on top of yours, putting you through the proper motions, helping you arrive at just the right touch, Beranbaum is the one.

At 640 pages and nearly two inches thick, Pie, the big book with the shortest possible title, is difficult to read in bed. It's hard to hold up. It weighs on the stomach. But bed is where you will want to take it, night after night, following author Richard Haedrich's lead through fruit pies, berry pies, nut pies, custard pies, turnovers, ice cream pies, and more. Headrich has the most reassuring voice in food literature, and his lifelong passion--the making and baking of all manner of pies--soon begins to fit the reader like new skin.