Baking up a batch of new cookbooks

I love to cook and bake all year, but I have to admit, the colder seasons inspire me. The oven warms the entire house with the delectable scent of fresh-baked breads or cakes, and as night falls early and cold, a warm kitchen is often a nicer place to be than the great outdoors.

We've rounded up some intriguing new cookbooks for fall. Many seem to speak to the season, especially "Gratins," which is focused on creamy, warm dishes that go a long way toward melting off the autumn chill. But few people could resist the delightful cupcakes that Magnolia Bakery is famous for, whatever the weather.

'Big' night
There are only two of us in my home, but I come from a family of nine, and in addition to holiday get-togethers, dinner parties and book-club meetings, I often find myself cooking for more than just a pair. So I appreciated the concept of "The Big Platter Cookbook," by Lou Jane Temple and A. Cort Sinnes (Stewart, Tabori and Chang, $30).

The book's 100 recipes are divided by season and by occasion. Although the book's authors admit to not being "big on starters," I found their artichoke hummus, invented by accident (one of the authors didn't have tahini, but did have artichokes), to be a garlicky, creamy treat. When I set out to make my own hummus months before using this book, I went to three grocery stories hunting for tahini, and I still haven't opened the jar I finally found. If only I'd known that artichokes could do the trick (they also bring the fat content of the recipe way down).

Author Lou Jane Temple is the former owner of Kansas City restaurant Cafe Lulu, and I couldn't resist trying Cafe Lulu's Macaroni and Cheese, which she notes is one of the few dishes that's so popular it stayed on the menu year-round. And I soon found out why — this three-cheese dish was a comforting delight, and almost as good as the pasta itself was the topping, made from crushed potato chips! I was less happy with the restaurant's Blu Lu Salad, which is listed as the #1 most popular item on her menu. It sounded good: salad tossed with blueberries, blue cheese, fried pecans, and a raspberry-honey-vinegar dressing, but came across as alternately too sweet or too bland.

The book's company meatloaf looked goofy, with its addition of two hard-boiled eggs that show up when the loaf is sliced, but my husband loved it.

Although it wasn't yet winter when I tested the book, I couldn't resist the stuffed shells with mushroom sauce, from the book's winter chapter. Think lasagna, with shells instead of flat noodles, a ricotta-mozzarella-spinach filling, and a porcini and button mushroom sauce. The dish looked and smelled fabulous, but lacked the bite of a red-sauce pasta dish, although I appreciated the nutty bite of toasted walnuts. The book's company meatloaf looked goofy, with its addition of two hard-boiled eggs that show up when the loaf is sliced, but my husband loved it. And I was very pleased with a summer dessert of figs, nectarines and prosciutto served in a white wine and balsamic vinegar sauce. Preparation couldn't be much simpler, and the fruits and proscuitto snapped with flavor in the sweet dressing.

"Big Platter" made a big splash in my kitchen. —Gael Fashingbauer Cooper

Maybe ‘2.0’ will be better
It may be a vegetarian cookbook, but on first glance, "Cook 1.0" ($27.50, Stewart, Tabori & Chang) caught the eye of even a dedicated omnivore like me.  The recipes seemed clean and easy, with simple ingredients and focused flavors. Most are condensed to just a few steps and broken into clear tasks, delineated — in a brilliant bit of layout — by column, each recipe offset in multihued rows. That author Heidi Swanson wasn’t a trained chef didn’t faze me; I have plenty of faith in home cooks, and too often I find chefs’ recipes to assume that I have all the time and ingredients in the world at my disposal.

This is, in concept, a perfect starter cookbook, with items to please veggies and carnivores alike.  Unfortunately, I was left wondering whether anyone tested them before they went to print. A broken lasagna with cherry tomatoes sounded delectable on the page, but after I was told to mix in an entire cup of breadcrumbs, my suspicions were heightened. The results were enough to induce starch shock.

The author’s decision to do her own food photography left me wondering about her fixation with narrow depths of field. I really do like to see the food I’m supposed to cook

What works in “Cook 1.0” is the clean design, which made it a cinch to parse the recipes. Too often in cookbooks, arty photos take center stage while instructions are rendered in an unparsable stream of consciousness. (Speaking of photos, the author’s decision to do her own food photography left me wondering about her fixation with narrow depths of field. I really do like to see the food I’m supposed to cook.) But the recipes can’t hold up their end of the deal. Even if they were ironclad, they might aptly fill a $12 paperback. For nearly $28, it’s not unreasonable to expect brilliance.

Oh, and the term “1.0” is just so, like, over — even if Ms. Swanson founded Chickclick.com. The shortfalls here are all fixable, though. With a talented co-author, a “Cook 2.0” — without the circa-1996 title — might work quite well.     —Jon Bonné

Dish it up
"Comfort food" is one of those foodie terms that means something different to everyone. It can mean the familiar, childhood favorites of PB&J and hamburgers. But to me, it usually means something creamy, hot and smooth — mac and cheese, scalloped potatoes, creamy soups. So I was eager to test the recipes from Tina Salter's "Gratins: Savory and Sweet Recipes from Oven to Table" (Ten Speed Press, $19).

Salter describes gratins as "baked dishes with a rich, creamy interior and a crisp, golden topping." Not every dish in her book fits the traditional idea of what a gratin is — I hadn't thought of French onion soup as one, although the step of baking the soup with its bread and cheese topping certainly appears to qualify. She begins her book with a much-needed guide to one of the most vital ingredients in any gratin: the dish. Although I did go out and buy another casserole dish while testing recipes from this book, it's possible, she notes, to make gratins in pie plates, ramekins or other dishes you may already have.

Salter again and again returns to a simple bread-crumb topping that for whatever reason was more something to be shoved aside than to be savored.

From Salter's "Perfect Potatoes" chapter, I tested her prosciutto-mashed potato gratin. This dish is about as simple as you can get, mixing salty prosciutto with just-mashed russets and Parmesan cheese, layered with mozzarella slices. The mozzarella melted between the layers, producing gooey, steaming strings of cheese in every other bite. While I loved the simple creaminess of the dish — see above for my "comfort food" definition — some tasters found it just too bland.

A bigger hit came from Salter's "Sublime Suppers" chapter, fettucini with proscuitto (again) and peas. This divine dinner had my tasters returning for seconds and thirds. The dish offered a nice mix of meat, veg and pasta, all held together by creamy (that word again) melted cheese. Only two complaints: The recipe called for a teaspoon of grated lemon zest, which dominated the bites it found its way into. And Salter again and again returns to a simple bread-crumb topping that for whatever reason was more something to be shoved aside than to be savored. Next time I'll create my own topping for this dish.

And as someone who stubbornly clings to my own simple, no-fail recipe for French onion soup, I had to try Salter's. Verdict: A completely acceptable option. Her addition of herbes de Provence gave the classic dish what my husband called "a restaurant taste," and I liked her addition of white wine.

As winter comes on, I suspect that "Gratins" will move its way to the front of my cookbook shelf — the cold weather and early darkness seems to beg for a hot, creamy dinner. The fact that most can be cooked and served from one dish makes it even better.    —G.F.C.

Let them eat cupcakes
New York City's Magnolia Bakery has helped bring cupcakes, those adorable little bites of crumb and icing, out of the realm of children's birthday parties and into high society. Their colorful cupcakes grace the cover of "More from Magnolia: Recipes from the World-Famous Bakery and Allysa Torey's Home Kitchen" (Simon & Schuster, $27). The book follows "The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook," which came out in 1999, three years after Torey opened the bakery.

To review this book without trying Magnolia's cupcake recipe would be like going to Disneyland and not riding the rides. Torey says that the most popular cupcake at the bakery is the "vanilla vanilla" — vanilla cupcakes with vanilla icing. So despite my own leaning towards chocolate, I baked the "vanilla vanilla." The cupcake recipe was simple, but does require a mix of all-purpose and self-rising flour, which might require some cooks to hit the grocery store to pick up a bag of self-rising. The cupcakes were moist and sweet, living up to their marquee position on the book's cover. I was slightly less pleased with the vanilla buttercream icing, which the book notes is technically not a butter cream, but simply a powdered sugar and butter frosting. To me it was overwhelmingly sweet and a little cloying, too much to take in the heavy dollops shown in the book's photos.

To review this book without trying Magnolia's cupcake recipe would be like going to Disneyland and not riding the rides.

While quick breads may not have the cachet of Magnolia's cupcakes, I love them, and tried two of them from the book. I can never pass up a banana-bread recipe, and Magnolia's banana bread with coconut and pecans vanished as quickly as I could slice it. While not as sweet as many recipes, the bread had a nice heft to it, and the coconut blended well with the bananas. I also baked two loaves of the zucchini-walnut bread, from a recipe Torey notes she's been tweaking since she was a teen. She might want to keep tweaking: It baked up high and beautiful, but there just wasn't a lot of taste to the bread — and this from a zucchini-bread fan. The iced ginger cookies were a snappy, sharp delight, but they looked so beautiful fresh out of the oven that I couldn't bring myself to ice them.

Baking books are my favorite kind of cookbook, and "More from Magnolia" has the feminine elegance I expect from a cookbook about sweets. While there aren't as many photos as I would like, and they're all gathered together instead of distributed throughout the book, the photos that are there make the dishes look so luscious I want to bake every one of them.

Gael Fashingbauer Cooper is MSNBC.com's Books Editor and a former food and restaurant editor. Jon Bonné covers the food and wine industry for MSNBC.com

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