Icebox Cakes or Italian Cheese

Icebox Cakes: Simply Irresistible No-Bake Desserts

Author: Lauren Chattman

In Icebox Cakes, Lauren Chattman proves once again that it is possible to make great-tasting and beautiful desserts without turning on your oven. In this book, chilling takes the place of baking, and pound cake, wafer cookies, and snack cakes replace traditional layer cakes in 50 surprisingly easy recipes for cheesecakes, terrines, ice cream cakes, and cupcakes. With recipes including Ginger and Caramel Ice Cream Cake, Cappuccino Crunch Cheesecake, and Devil Dog Mousse Cake, preparations are simple and the results are simply spectacular!

What People Are Saying

Nancy Baggett
For anyone interested in "baking" without actually baking, this book has lots of clever, very doable ideas. The author starts with stand-ins for scratch cakes and turns them into a handy, attractive collection of icebox desserts. (Nancy Baggett, author of The All-American Cookie Book and The All-American Dessert Book)

Interesting textbook: Diabetes Fit Food or Golden Pear Cafe Cookbook

Italian Cheese: A Guide to Their Discovery and Appreciation

Author: Piero Sardo

Slow Food is sweeping the nation, at a snail's pace. This international organization was started in Italy by people who perceive McDonald's as the symbol of a society that is overshooting its own limits. The greatest loss of all is the pleasure of eating foods that are made without the restrictions of time.

Many of the cheeses portrayed in this delightful book—stracciata, giuncata, formaggio di fossa, formaggetta della valle Argentina—are not household names and they probably never will be. They're a few of the 201 traditional Italian farmhouse cheeses lovingly described in this new book from Slow Food International as a "contribution to the conservation of a vast heritage of local products, born of Italy's extraordinarily varied landscapes, natural environments, dairy breeds, and cheesemaking techniques."

Starting with illustrated descriptions of traditional and industrial cheesemaking, Slow Food's authors take us through the processes of buying, tasting, and storing cheeses. Dictionaries of tasting terms and the language of cheeses and cheesemaking provide essential preludes for the heart of this book—descriptions of Italy's farmhouse cheeses, traditionally made from cow's, ewe's, and goat's milk.

Organized by region and accompanied by elegant color photographs, each description covers how the cheese is made and matured, along with historical and geographic nuggets.

Written by people in love with farmhouse cheeses, and with everything small, local, slow, and traditional foods and food systems represent, this is an informative and hopeful book, celebrating a rich, rural European tradition. This book will make you start packing your bags for a cheese lover's tour of Italy.