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The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook By Julie V. Hansen and Suzanne Porter Simon & Schuster, 127 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com Butter Sugar Flour Eggs By Gale Gand, Rick Tramonto and Julia Moskin Clarkson Potter Publishers, 288 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com Cooking Contest Cookbook By Joyce Compagna and Don Compagna Simon & Schuster; 288 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

Similarly, whenever I see a baking cookbook that has pretty pictures, I tend to forget that I probably have every recipe in it already. (Unless the book is one of Rose Levy Berenbaum's unparalleled "Bibles" or Flo Braker's "Sweet Miniatures" or a few other baking books that anyone with an oven and a flour canister should be required to own.) In fact, every recipe in most baking books appears, in some form, in some edition of "The Joy of Cooking" or "Fanny Farmer." It's daunting to realize how much money and shelf space you could save if you compared a cookbook's index with the one in "The Joy" or "Fanny" before you took out your wallet. The bookstore owner might not like you very much, but doesn't he want an informed customer?

Take The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook, by Jennifer Appel and Allysa Torey. This charming little volume promises "a treasure trove of deliciously old-fashioned and deeply satisfying recipes for more than 75 unabashedly self-indulgent desserts." "Wow! Tortellini salad!" I found myself thinking again, except that this time I was thinking, "Wow! Caramel pecan brownies! Oatmeal muffins! Traditional vanilla birthday cake cupcake with traditional vanilla butter cream!" (This despite the fact that I've made all three of those baked goods many, many times over the years.)

The photos in the book are great, and the headnotes are cozy. "Your mouth will be watering in no time!" ... "This scrumptious bar is a perfect blend of fruit and crumb." ... "One of our customers came into the bakery one afternoon with this recipe from his aunt, handwritten on an index card." An index card! Proof of homey greatness.

But that aunt may well have copied a "Joy of Cooking" recipe onto that index card. There just aren't too many recipes for standard baked goods out there. "We confess we've improved on a classic recipe," the authors say when they introduce their German chocolate cake. True, their recipe has a quarter-cup more sugar than the standard. True, they've doubled the standard amount of frosting, but you don't need to buy a whole separate book to help you realize that more frosting on a cake is usually better.

And speaking of frosting, the vanilla butter cream in this book is the one on the Domino Confectioners Sugar box with an extra tablespoon of milk. (It needs a pinch of salt, by the way.) Why is this vanilla butter cream so much better? The secret, say Appel and Torey, "is that we just whip it longer than you'd think necessary to get that extra-creamy texture." Again, this is not a hint you need to buy a book for. There's nothing wrong with "The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook," but cave canem. Oh, no, wait -- I mean caveat emptor. Unless you have a deep, heartfelt need to look at eight pages of color photographs, you should check your shelves before you rush out and buy this. Any cookbook author can tinker with the classics a bit, but it's almost impossible to make them really distinctive -- unless you're Rose Levy Berenbaum.

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I'm not saying that you should try to save your money. Oh, no, no, no! I'll buy a cookbook if it's got even one idea that intrigues me; I like to reward the author for her ingenuity. (This is the same reasoning that made me buy Yoko Ono's "Season of Glass" after John Lennon was shot. I didn't want the record at all, but I thought I should help Ono out.) Another baking book, Butter Sugar Flour Eggs, has recipes you absolutely won't find in the average encyclopedic cookbook. The authors' crunchy chocolate hazelnut bars combine two chocolate treatments: a thick, dense, fudgy layer made with Nutella and crumbled Pepperidge Farm Bordeaux cookies, two of the modern pantry's most miraculous ingredients, and a mousse-y layer made with chocolate, whipped cream, crème fraiche and Amaretto. The bars take about two seconds to make and have maximum showoff value.

This book has other ideas I haven't seen elsewhere. Grate frozen shortbread dough into the baking pan to give it "a lighter, more open texture." Add a cream-cheese layer to standard lemon or lime squares; add dried apricots to rice pudding instead of raisins. Use less cornmeal than usual when you make corn muffins. "You'd think that using more cornmeal would yield more corn flavor, but it doesn't seem to work that way: Cornmeal must be cut with other flours or it can turn bitter and soapy." A good corrective to my fixed notion that doubling the "good" ingredient always improves the recipe ...

Next page | The lengths cooks will go to to win a cooking contest