Food news antipasto

As the holidays creep closer, people who love to bake are gearing up for their favorite time of the year. Trays of cookies, celebratory cakes like bûche de Noël, and Thanksgiving and Christmas pies all beckon. If you are living in the United States and are looking forward to holiday baking season, you might want to buy your flour now, as a poor US wheat harvest is set to boost prices. In addition, bad weather in Canada and Russia, two other large wheat producers, is putting additional stress on the availability of quality milling wheat.

Keeping the baking theme going, our next article focuses on cake – specifically, how cake has comforted writer Kiran Sidhu through life’s ups and downs. She loves to bake because “It’s a good lesson in life: humble beginnings can have majestic ends.” I couldn’t agree more.

One more article that touches on cake and I will move to another topic. This one is from Australian chef Neil Perry, whose latest cookbook Everything I Love to Cook has just been released. Perry shared four recipes from his new book with Good Food (Aus), including one for a flourless chocolate cake. We have linked these online recipes here.

The pandemic has been a top driver of food trends for the past year and a half, and that is reflected in the offerings during the virtual Summer Fancy Foods Show that started this week. One trend that shows no signs of abating is an increased interest in spices. Spice and seasoning sales of grew eight times faster in 2020 than in 2019, “and the category is on track to grow by 7.6% annually over the next five years, up from 3.6% annual growth pre-pandemic,” according to Smart Brief.

Cookbooks are more than mere collections of ingredients and instructions. The best of them also provide a sense of place, compelling stories, and useful, beautiful design. The last attribute is the focus of a guest post on Stained Pages by book designer and creative director Frances Baca. Frances chose ten of this season’s books to discuss from a design perspective.

Note from Jenny: I will cover this in Friday’s roundup but just to let our members know – Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Cookie Bible will be published in early fall/autumn of 2022 instead of next month. Issues with printing and more resulted in a delay that would not have the book out in time for holiday baking.