I have been looking forward to writing about this cookbook, the third in my reviews of food books - here and here. Baking Made Easy is most certainly one of the most delicious cookbooks in the shops at the moment. Lorraine Pascale is already a star, her book is high up in the book sales charts - no. 2 after Jamie Oliver, in the cookbook charts, and onto its fourth reprint earlier this year - probably even more by now. That is well over 150,000 copies sold and they are calling her the black Nigella. I noticed when I was last at Waterstone's Piccadilly branch (Europe's largest book shop) that her event there was sold out. Next weekend she has the prime slot in the Observer Food Monthly magazine - leading on her favourite Easter cake recipes. I don't believe that any baker has ever been quite so celebrated.
This post has taken a while to come together. When I first heard about the TV programme, I thought how odd, a cooking programme just about baking? However a black woman cooking on TV was going to catch my interest. It has been an unbelievable several decades - yes decades - since Rusty Lee - was gracing morning TV, and so while, I am not particularly into baking these days, having spent my youth obsessively terrorising my parents every weekend with different flavours of Victoria Sandwich cakes that I would bake from scratch - I thought that I'd probably watch just a few of Lorraine's Backing Made Easy programmes on BBC2.
Well of course, I know that you know this is a book blog, and I'm supposed to be up on these things, but I must have watched about 3 of the programmes before it dawned on me that there was a book too. I can a be a bit slow on the up-take sometimes. I ordered it on Amazon, but they let me down - Baking Made Easy did not arrive as they specified. When I finally got round to chasing Amazon up about it, they did send it promptly after that, but by then the TV inspired baking urge had long disappeared. It has not reappeared, to be honest. It's Lent, and I am kind of trying to be good. Lorraine bakes wonderfully stunning cakes and breads, and as you expect of a former supermodel, she looks wonderful on TV. Definitely not a black Nigella, since Lorraine is wonderfully free of all that sexual innuendo and flirting knowingly with the camera stuff that NIgella does. I am a fan of Nigella's, but obviously one of the few who watch her programmes for the actual cooking.
I'd first read about Lorraine during the cupcake phenomenon that swept through the UK a couple of summers ago, so knew that she has a cupcake shop (Ella's Bakehouse) in Covent Garden, central London, and that she'd been a supermodel before that. I was however overwhelmed to read more recently that she'd been put into care at three months old, adopted at eighteen months old and at eight years old was put into care once again. This was a few years after her adoptive parents divorced and her adoptive mother had become ill. She returned to take Lorraine back when she was well again. There has been no contact with her birth parents. It seems that Lorraine is a really strong and resilient lady, she's been quoted as saying 'I think that children in care and fostering, if you can have just one person you can talk to, it can save you.' Too glib to say that she's role model, but definitely someone sensible to admire whatever your chosen path and ambitions.
Well what it's it like then? Beautiful. As is the way with today's style of cookbook, it would not be complete without stunning photographs. Not just of the cakes and dishes, but of an incredibly gorgeous Lorraine - sieving flour; stirring cakes, food shopping in markets - here and in France, I think, and just posing prettily. The piece that sets it apart for me is the lovely essay that appears as the introduction, in which she says 'Looking back at my life with its inevitable high and lows, I now realise that I have always found a sense of purpose and a strength of mind, when I am in the kitchen. The phone will ring and drama will unfold outside, but cooking is where I find my peace and quite. Time feels like it's standing still when actually it is flying by. I believe this is called being 'in the flow' - when you are so passionately and happily engaged in an activity that you lose all track of time.' I can relate to that. This book will certainly give those moments of being in a pure moment of creative joy, followed by intense greedy eating pleasure.
TV has been pretty slow in the early part of this year, I am thoroughly enjoying Treme on Sky, and The Model Agency on Channel 4, I am embarrassed - but not ashamed to say, has given me moments of guilty schadenfreude pleasure. However the high point so far has been watching Lorraine bake her 'I can't believe you made that' Cake. It's simply the most lovely thing - a chocolate cake, decorated with chocolate fingers, that you fill with flowers or fruit. It looks easy to make (well Lorraine made it look so) and looked absolutely stunning. I am going to bake it one day. It makes me so happy to know that I have this recipe.
One thing that surprised me was that while the book is called Baking Made Easy, the ethos is 'anything that goes in the oven.' Which means they have their cake, and eat savoury options too. My understanding of baking is cakes and puddings, but by making the book anything that goes in the oven, there are also a range of dishes that you would find in any cookbook - pizza's, pies, beef and prawn dishes etc. To me it feels as if at some point someone - the publishers? the programme makers? Lorraine herself? decided that an £18.99 cookbook or a TV cookery series had to have the full dinner party options in it. As I say, I am surprised, rather than complaining, since in the end I too chose to cook one of these options. The Garlic and Sherry Mussels dish, when Mr Muse suddenly announced he was going to die if he did not eat any seafood. This dish includes everything you'd do when cooking traditional Moules Mariniere, but instead of wine its sherry and while you can also cook it on the hob, you actually stick it in the oven for about eight minutes. Easy peasy, with a delicious mopping up sherry sauce. So I am very happy to recommend this book to you, like the star patisserie chef herself, this is a pretty special cookbook.
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