Cookbook review: A New Way to Bake, from the Kitchens of Martha Stewart

The Kitchens of Martha Stewart have come up with 130 new recipes in A New Way to Bake, transforming classic favorites with the incorporation of healthier additions, like farro in chocolate chip cookies, quinoa in pancakes, and chia seeds in granola. This is not a "diet" book, but a book that updates your baking with "better for you" ingredients.

With Easter and Passover right around the corner, two recipes immediately caught my eye. The zucchini-almond cake uses almond flour and potato starch, making it Passover-friendly (with some recipe adjustments), and the ginger-mango cream pie, a cream cheese confection, would be perfect for an Easter brunch.

The pie uses granola as an interesting base for the crust, and the filling is a mixture of cream cheese, Greek yogurt, ginger, and honey. Fresh mango and a drizzle of honey complete the pie, making it a visual delight. I wanted even more ginger flavor, so I added about two tablespoons of dried candied ginger to my filling. The recipe simply called for cream cheese, and I used full-fat, but you could certainly experiment with low-fat or Neufchatel. It would be very easy to make this recipe your own by trying different flavored granolas and topping it off with any fresh fruit, perhaps kiwi or strawberries.

There are both sweet and savory recipes included in A New Way to Bake: Whole-wheat almond butter sandwich cookies, and a chocolate beet cake; mushroom tart, and chickpea-vegetable pancakes among them. An oddball moment in the book came when the gluten-free quinoa pancakes listed ¾ cup of all-purpose flour in the ingredients. (Perhaps gluten-free flour was intended?) Many of the recipes in the book still contain enough butter and sugar to make them familiar and guarantee great taste, making this more of a gateway book to healthier baking.