Pillsbury best of the bake-off cookbook: recipes from America's favorite cooking contest

Forty years of fiercely competitive cooking have made the Pillsbury Bake-Off the country's leading amateur cooking contest. Cooks eagerly train and try to impress judges and earn both fortune and fame. Purists complain that the Bake-Off too often promotes use of the sponsor's manufactured products, but a glance at the winning recipes shows a balanced selection of recipes. Pillsbury Best of the Bake-Off Cookbook0 brings together recipes from the contest's origins through 2002. Following the winning recipes from year to year shows how Italian and Mexican dishes have become utterly mainstream in American cooking. Cilantro, mango, white chocolate, oat bran--ingredients unheard of when the contest began--are now de rigueur in contemporary home recipes. And every one of the book's recipes now includes a rudimentary nutritional guide. One constant remains: America still has an insatiable sweet tooth, and the Tunnel of Fudge Cake that once took the country by storm continues to be an American favorite. Even youngsters enjoy perusing winning recipes to inspire their own contest entries. --Mark Knoblauch Copyright 2004 Booklist

The 53-year old Pillsbury Bake-Off competition is still America's most well-known and popular cooking contest. This newly revised volume sums up the accomplishments of talented amateurs, with nearly 400 recipes from past competitions, including recent prize-winning dishes. Lavishly illustrated with mouthwatering photographs, the volume shares a short history and general cooking tips, then delves into the recipes, themselves a portrait of American cooking over the past five decades. There's the Tunnel of Fudge Cake, which won the 1966 prize and put the Bundt cake pan into the home cook's kitchen; as well as Golden Sesame Loaves, a 1988 winner that reflects "the growing interest in more nutritious yeast breads in the 1980s." Covering all the usual recipe categories, from Main Dishes to the newly introduced Quick and Easy Main Meals, the book is especially strong in the baking arena, probably because in the contest's early years, the only qualifying ingredient was half a cup of flour. Now the list of possible qualifying products has lengthened considerably, allowing contestants to give full range to their imaginations. With small descriptions (including nutritional information) of each dish and many helpful hints and tips, the book is a useful general cookbook for any bookshelf-and of special appeal to chefs aspiring to the Bake-Off Crown. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

The 53-year old Pillsbury Bake-Off competition is still America's most well-known and popular cooking contest. This newly revised volume sums up the accomplishments of talented amateurs, with nearly 400 recipes from past competitions, including recent prize-winning dishes. Lavishly illustrated with mouthwatering photographs, the volume shares a short history and general cooking tips, then delves into the recipes, themselves a portrait of American cooking over the past five decades. There's the Tunnel of Fudge Cake, which won the 1966 prize and put the Bundt cake pan into the home cook's kitchen; as well as Golden Sesame Loaves, a 1988 winner that reflects "the growing interest in more nutritious yeast breads in the 1980s." Covering all the usual recipe categories, from Main Dishes to the newly introduced Quick and Easy Main Meals, the book is especially strong in the baking arena, probably because in the contest's early years, the only qualifying ingredient was half a cup of flour. Now the list of possible qualifying products has lengthened considerably, allowing contestants to give full range to their imaginations. With small descriptions (including nutritional information) of each dish and many helpful hints and tips, the book is a useful general cookbook for any bookshelf-and of special appeal to chefs aspiring to the Bake-Off Crown. (Feb.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.