Now in Paper! Caprial Pence has teamed up with Melissa Carey, her pastry chef at Caprial’s Bistro, to create another fantastic cookbook, this one entirely devoted to desserts! In preparing the collection, Caprial and Melissa poured through their recipe files, winnowing them down to 50 core recipes, each grounded in the chefs’ shared appreciation of wholesome, comforting, no-nonsense desserts that beg to be made time and again. The result is a deeply satisfying, truly essential collection of classic and contemporary recipes for cakes, pies, and tarts; custards and puddings; ice creams and sorbets; and cookies and special-occasion desserts.

Like a culinary school class, Caprial's Desserts focuses on the basic process pastry chefs practice daily—using master recipes and techniques as a springboard for developing creative new desserts. Building on the 50 master recipes, each chapter reveals how they can be finessed to create one exciting variation after another. Along the way, clear step-by-step photographs put you alongside Caprial and Melissa in their kitchen as they share their secrets for making extraordinary pie dough, working wonders with an ice cream machine, perfecting the delicate art of puff pastry, and numerous other essentials of the sweet kitchen.

If you are new to baking, this book will give you the confidence, inspiration, and skills to build a solid dessert repertoire; if you are an experienced baker, it will help you hone classic techniques and push you to new levels of creativity and improvisation in the kitchen. A model of beauty and clarity, Caprial's Desserts is destined to become a well-thumbed, and flour-caked fixture on your kitchen bookshelf.