Babycakes Covers The Classics: Gluten-Free Vegan Recipes from Donuts to Snickerdoodles.

• Author: Puterbaugh, Dolores T.
• Position: Book review

BABYCAKES COVERS THE CLASSICS: Gluten-Free Vegan Recipes from Donuts to Snickerdoodles BY ERIN MCKENNA CLARKSON POTTER PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK (DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE) 2011, 144 PAGES, $25.00

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Erin McKenna, a previously published cookbook author, is the owner of BabyCakes NYC, a specialty bakery with locations in New York, Orlando, Fla., and Los Angeles, Calif. The bakery specializes in foods that meet a dizzying array of criteria: gluten-free, kosher, vegan, and without refined sugars or artificial sweeteners. There is no soy or casein; thus, the products are safe for people with numerous food concerns. My publisher, knowing my combined interest in baking and avoiding gluten, asked me to test drive these recipes. I am decidedly not a vegan--sorry, I am an extremely enthusiastic omnivore--but I have no quarrel with enjoying a meatless meal, since this is a religious requirement every week, anyway.

First, I would like to compliment the user-friendly tone of this book. I have more than 40 years of baking and cooking experience; it is safe to assume that everyone who adopts a vegan lifestyle, or is diagnosed with celiac or another gluten-sensitive condition, does not. Cooking and baking from scratch comprise more than just following directions: one has to develop a sense of the ways ingredients interact, and the effects of climate and altitude; these are not skills best developed when desperate to eat something that will not send you to the hospital besides vegetables, brown rice, and fruit. Therefore, careful yet not condescending instructions about measurement, tools, and what terms...