I have purchased four recipe books in my lifetime. Two are by Alton Brown, one is Ratios, and the last is 125 Best Cheesecakes. The last of these makes a barely passable doorstop let alone a cookbook. The metric measurements it lists aren’t by mass but by volume leading the reader to add 125ml of sugar or 200ml of eggs to a recipe. This is practically less than useless as it takes up the space where I could have written measurements by mass. Its recipe tips are a list of near tautologies like “to change the texture of the crust, adjust how long you crush the graham crackers”. This man is the Gauss of cheesecakes… Internally, there are pictures of some of the cheesecakes but they are nowhere near the recipe to make that cake and the photos don’t even include a cross reference to a page.

My final criticism is in its “aspirational” bake times. I’ve yet to prepare something from this recipe book that didn’t require at least 20% more bake time. Today’s recipe was off by a factor of 2 and I was rather late to a surprised party because of it. I suppose it being a custard I could have left and come back to it but I leave no cake behind.