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'The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook'
Recipes by Tarek Malouk and the Hummingbird Bakers
Photographs by Peter Cassidy
Rylan Peters & Small -- 2009
Buy it on Amazon

Once a journalist, London-based writer Tarek Malouk forsook his career to indulge his love of American desserts. As visions of cupcakes, pies and brownies pranced in his head, he enrolled in baking classes in New York and returned to London, eager to open a restaurant to showcase his cherished treats.

Though one might typically be hard-pressed to picture a hard-nosed journalist convert to cooking and create such a loving, warm cookbook, Malouk successfully conveys his love and appreciation for the range of American desserts in "The Hummingbird Cookbook."

See what we tested and find out whether the book's worth buying after the jump.

All across the country, there are desserts that are well-recognized and much beloved. From deep-dish apple pie to devil's food cake, The All-American Dessert Book is a collection of recipes for these favorite sweets, collected from diners and home chefs around the county who produced the finest versions of the desserts. After extensive testing, all those recipes were narrowed down to the best 150.

While the recipes themselves are all of very high quality, so are both the writing and the photography. Author Nancy Baggett gives very, very detailed instructions for each recipe making them virtually fool proof - barring some unfortunate kitchen malfunction, of course. She makes suggestions about ingredients and gives lots of tips that will help bakers in the long run. Along with the actual instructions, each dish is accompanied by a little story of its origin or some notes about where in the country this particular version came from.

Some of the recipes, like Maple Sugar on Snow, are for regional favorites and others, like blueberry buckles and kettle corn, are popular just about everywhere. You won't find any "diet" recipes in this book, but the pictures are enough to make you stick to whatever diet you follow just to have an excuse to indulge.

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