When I heard the UPS truck outside this morning I knew what it was delivering: my new copy of The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide To Culinary Creativity, Based On The Wisdom Of America’s Most Imaginative Chefs. I ran downstairs from my office to the front door and there it was…

I’d heard from many of my food-loving friends and bloggers about this fabulous book, but had no idea how good it really is. So good that I just had to share it with you. As someone who writes about food I often struggle to come up with something clever and delicious. This book has solved that problem! Thank you Karen and Andrew for what must have been an exhausting exercise.

Comprised of an impressive and extensive list of foods and cuisines, the book includes synonyms, seasons, functions, cooking techniques, flavor affinities/matching, and more. Brilliant! For example, if you have a bunch of chestnuts and don’t know what to do with them it suggests ingredients from Armagnac to sweet Marsala, but recommends avoiding berries. Flavor affinities for chestnuts include bacon and fennel or orange and pear, to name just a couple. Call- outs are also given to famous chefs and how they use that particular ingredient. Such as Gina DePalma, pastry chef at Babbo, who created a Chestnut Spice Cake With Mascarpone Cream.

Simply put, The Flavor Bible is an inspiring must-have for your kitchen! Even if you don’t write about food.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Perfect Scrambled Eggs
• Moorish Badenjan Dip
• Celebrating Chanterelles
• Remedies for Your Butternut Squash Addiction
• Fabulous Flu Fighting Foods

If I were to live my life as a confection I’d definitely choose to be a cupcake. They’re cute, everybody loves them, and because they’re the perfect size you never hear, “Ugh, I really shouldn’t have eaten that. It was just tooooo much!” Unless you’re me, who gluttonously ate three of them the other day. But that’s what happens when:

1) you love cupcakes,
2) you stumble upon a bakery in your new neighborhood that just happens to specialize in cupcakes,
3) you decide your readers need to hear -more than anything else- about said bakery’s fabulous cupcakes.

So I blame my dessert debauchery on Cupcake Royale. It’s simply their fault that they had so many delicious cupcakes from which to choose and make myself happily sick.

The flavors we chose for our dutiful experiment were:

• Lavender: Real lavender buds in vanilla buttercream on vanilla cake,
• Coconut Bunny: Vanilla buttercream topped with coconut on chocolate cake,
• Peppermint Party: Minty green peppermint buttercream on chocolate cake,
• Triple Threat: Chocolate buttercream with dark chocolate bits on chocolate cake,
• A seasonal strawberry buttercream on chocolate cake,
• A specialty Red Velvet cake with cream cheese frosting.

Cupcake Royale was voted Seattle’s Best Cupcake 2008 and I gleefully concur. Their three Seattle-area bakeries whip up their diminutive sweeties bright and early each day. As they say, “Shelf life = Today!” Their “Rules of Cupcake Goodness” simply state: no preservatives, no box mixes, use only top-quality ingredients from local or sustainable sources, no shortening, hand frosted, and make them with lots of love.

Just like mom used to make!

I’ll be back soon for another round of “testing.”

Possibly Related Posts:

• The Importance of Pie Crust
• Remedies for Your Butternut Squash Addiction
• Eating Local in the Northwest
• 10 Fall Dishes We Cant Wait For
• Woodstock Granola