Beatrice Ojakangas' Light and Easy Baking: More Than 200 Low-Fat and Delicious Recipes for Cookies, Cakes, Pies, Desserts a ND Breads

Ojakangas (Light Muffins; Quick Breads) fine-tunes the ingredient lists on some 200 baked goods (many already relatively low in fat) to bring them warm from the oven with a fat content well under 30%. Fruit purees and low-fat dairy products replace oils and other fatty ingredients without a loss of moisture or texture. Although Ojakangas's detailed instructions make these recipes--and the shift in baking procedures some of the substitutions require--accessible to home bakers, her precision elsewhere can be somewhat irritating. Nutritional counts are measured down to the hundredths and each recipe is strictly categorized (shaped, bar, drop, or twice-baked cookies, for example). Nevertheless, such recipes as Cocoa-Nutmeg Snickerdoodles, Swedish Almond Rusks and Cranberry-Raisin Streusel Cheesecake amply reward the home baker's persistence. Ojakangas is a reliable and inventive recipe writer: Mango Angel Pie (a meringue crust and an uncooked filling), Wild Rice Muffins, Icelandic Three-Grain Brown Bread, Crab and Vegetable Torte and a Swedish saffron-scented bread known as Saint Lucia Crown are examples of some of the unexpected pleasures in the collection. (Oct.)