Book Review: Mary Berry's Baking Bible

As an amateur baker I have always looked for different types of baking books. Mary Berry’s Baking Bible was my very first and kick started my baking passion (also I am a huge fan of The Great British Bake off! Not got the confidence to apply and go on but I do love watching the show)

This book is a delight! Filled with great recipes. It is always my go to for ideas and easy recipes. It has some great standard bakes. My favourite is the Cheesy Biscuits. This always goes down well at parties and gatherings. I have tweaked some recipes to my liking as found some recipes suggest too much salt and sugar as an example, but this is just a preference (my book is covered in writing and notes on how I prefer my cakes to taste) and one day I would love to hand this down to the next generation.

I have tried all the sponge recipes and they are great! Really easy and full of flavour and easy to follow instructions.

Those are many positives but there are some negatives.

I love baking books where most recipes have images. Having used this book, I would say 30-40% of the recipes do not have images. As an amateur baker and when I started out, I really relied on images to show me what the outcome would be. If this book had more images I would have considered 5 stars.

Some recipes are hit and miss. I have tried the scones and they never turn out correct. Following the recipe exact also does not give the correct result. It might be Im doing something wrong. But after many attempts I have given up. There are some pages I have marked as “Do Not Try” as they fail every time I do it. I do wonder if all recipes were fully tried and tested as some do not seem to work. This might just be my own abilities but because of this I cannot give it 5 stars.

That said, I would highly recommend this book for baking beginners and this book gets 4 stars out of 5 from me.

#BookReview #MaryBerry #4Stars