It’s no secret that I love to read, after all my blog is called The Reading Chick. However, I also have another love, and that is baking. I also like to cook, but I LOVE to bake. For every holiday you can find me in the kitchen trying out a recipe that I’ve found on Pinterest. All of those pictures are colorful and make everything look so good that Pinterest has stolen away my attention from some cookbooks that I own but have never used.

I have been mulling over an idea to combine this love of reading with my love for baking. I am going to stretch my mind and my baking skills by taking on a cookbook that just may be beyond my skills. But the pictures are gorgeous and the bakery the cookbook comes from is quite famous. My challenge to myself is to bake a recipe a week and write about my success and failures on my blog, The Reading Chick, but these posts will be called The Reading Chick also Bakes with that weeks choice of recipe.

The cookbook that I will be tackling is…

Thomas Keller | Bouchon Bakery came out in 2012 and that year it was on all of the bestseller lists. I asked for it for Christmas and my sister very nicely gave it to me. I eagerly opened the book and very quickly deflated because the recipe’s called for me to measure ingredients using a scale and use some items I didn’t own in my own kitchen. I looked at all the pictures and quietly put it back on my shelf with all of my other cookbooks where it has sat gathering dust.

In the years since, I’ve been baking more and expanding my horizons, this past Christmas I actually baked a cake by measuring out the ingredients on a scale and my family declared it the best cake I’d ever baked. After that success I took this cookbook back off my shelf and cracked open the pages. I read the recommendation and reasons why you get better results by measuring. “When you measure by volume, the weight of an ingredient can differ each time.”* Meaning it doesn’t matter if you spooned the flour, packed it into the cup a little too much, etc. A gram is a gram. Maybe this was why my cake was so good this year? That aha! moment took away a little of the scariness in doing something that I had never done before and the idea for cooking one recipe a week and blogging about it was born.

I know this is not a new concept. There are bloggers who’ve become quite renowned for cooking all of the recipe’s in a cookbook. Even have had a movie made from one blogger’s experience in Julie and Julia, but I’m going into this to better my own skills, talk about what was challenging, what worked, and what the outcome of that week’s bake tasted like. In essence, doing this is a lot more for me than for you. LOL.

I need to decide how to get started. This is obviously going to cost a little bit in ingredients, specialty pans, etc. so do I want that cost to be spread out a little bit? You bet! In order to cut down on costs I won’t completing a chapter at a time. I will rotate chapters, but I will go in order of the next recipe to be baked in that chapter. That way I get to cook a variety and not get burned out before the cookie chapter is done. Speaking of cookies, that is the first chapter in this book and the first thing I will be baking.

I hope you’ll indulge me on veering slightly off track to take on this challenge and talk about it with you. Please feel free to bake along with me, but if you only want to read about, great! You can take it all in and feel good about the fact that between the two of us I’m the only one that can gain weight!

Wish me luck!

Deb

Click this link to purchase!** Bouchon Bakery (The Thomas Keller Library)

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*Thomas Keller | Bouchon Bakery

**Amazon Associate- if you purchase this book through the above link I’ll receive a small stipend.