Great Book for Dessert Food Porn Lovers

I am not using the phrase "food porn" in a negative fashion. Think about the popularity of Instagram and Pinterest for foods and for desserts in particular. Not everyone can make beautiful desserts either because we lack the skills or lack the tools and space to work in. Instead we get pleasure from looking at lovely foods we might not be able to make or afford. If you know someone who enjoys looking at desserts, I have a great gift idea for you: Dessert Boards by Kellie Hemmerly from the Quarto Publishing Group. The book just came out and I got a copy of it via the Amazon Vine program. I did a review on that site, but today's article will go into a lot more depth about the book and why I think it would be a good gift idea. I won't share a lot of photos, just a few so you have an idea of what is inside. No form of competition was received for this article today on The Chocolate Cult.

I want to make it clear that this is not a cookbook. A look at the table of contents (photo below) clearly demonstrates that fact. The recipes, 15 of them, all are in the final chapter. Most of the chapters include what you can see in the contents except for the Introduction which has sections aout why dessert boards are lovely, the types of boards you can use and why, the types of props you can use to add to the atmosphere you are creating with the boards, how to build up the board, and finally, how to transport it.

The photos are wonderful in this book. There is one for every board, which means that since the recipes are used in the boards, you can find those if you look. Usually cookbooks have few photos unless you want to spend a lot of money. Yes, this book is higher priced than a cookbook but if you are getting this for a person who loves looking at desserts or who wants to use a visual guide to recreate dessert boards, it should be a great use of your money for a gift.

When you first look at a board you might think it is a recipe, but it is more like artistic instructions. You get a list of the ingredients. Some are marked as ones with the recipes that you'd make at home and you'll find those recipes in the 7th chapter of the book. Most of the ingredients are bought from stores though which stores is left up to you to determine. By using primarily purchased desserts, this allows those of us without big kitchens to attempt dessert boards of our own, too, with less time, but arguably more money.

There are six chapters of dessert boards to inspire the reader/viewer. 8 breakfast, 8 holiday (all Western), 4 "around the world," 8 child-friendly, 4 general celebration ideas, and 18 "anytime" boards. This is a fair amount of variety, enough that I think I could build off of them to create my own ideas for dessert boards, too.

It is unlikely that the desserts you make or can find to buy will be identical to the ones you see on the boards. Your access to the wide variety of "boards" are also unlikely to exactly match those in the photos. The result will be that your board may not look identical, but does it need to? The point of art instruction is to engage us to make art, edible in this case, not to just copy it.

Think of this book as inspirational art instruction or food porn. It would be a great gift for anyone who loves desserts.