Sue Lawrence's Book of Baking: More Than 120 Glorious Breads, Biscuits, Cakes and Tarts

Scottish cookbook author Lawrence (Sue Lawrence's Scottish Kitchen) returns with a representative sampling of UK favorites ranging from a simple, basic bread to the elaborate Buche de Noel. Novice bakers will appreciate Lawrence's calm and reassuring tone and her salient tips for bread-baking should assuage most fears. Those with a soft spot for Anglican and European baked goods that will get the most out of the book. Savory meat pies, treacle tarts, linzertorte and the like dominate, though a fair but curious selection of American dishes (New York Cheesecake, Sour Cream Raisin Pie, cornbread and Coca-Cola Cake) make appearances as well. It adds up to a strange hodge-podge of recipes, like rifling through an anglophile relative's recipe box full of dishes clipped from newspapers that sounded good at the time.