Cold Butter, Warm Oven

Holiday baking for someone who has never done it, and wants it to come out right.

This book teaches the cookies, cakes, pies and breads people bake for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Eve, starting from nothing. It explains what each bake is, what every step is for, what the bake looks like when it is right, and what went wrong when it isn't. No recipe in it says "bake until done" and leaves you to guess.

What makes it different

• A photograph of every recipe, with notes on it. Each bake opens on a full-width photo with pinned notes pointing at the details that tell you it is right: the colour of the edges, the crack in the top, the inside of a broken cookie, the cut face of a pie.
• Grams and US cups, both. Every amount is given by weight and by US cups and spoons, converted ingredient by ingredient (using King Arthur Baking's weight chart for nearly all of them) and checked against each other, not with one rule for everything. Spoon-sized amounts are in spoons. Any ingredient with a different British name has it printed underneath.
• Every oven setting four ways: °F, °C, °C fan and gas mark, plus a page on checking what your oven really does with a thermometer.
• A plan for the season. A chart of how early each bake can be made and still be at its best on the day, what freezes, and a day-by-day plan from mid-November to New Year's Eve with space to write your own.
• Help when it goes wrong. Every recipe has an "It's done when" checklist, a "what you see / why / next time" table, and answers to the questions people ask (no molasses? no mixer? can I use salted butter?). A two-page bake clinic at the back covers cookies, cakes, pies, bread, icing and choux.

The 19 recipes

Cookies: Butter Shortbread, Snowball Cookies, Chocolate Crinkle Cookies, Cut-Out Sugar Cookies, Gingerbread People, Royal Icing, Jam Thumbprints, Cranberry Orange Biscotti, Cranberry Sauce Crumb Bars (for the sauce left over from Thanksgiving)

Cakes and loaves: Pumpkin Bread, Sticky Ginger Loaf, Chocolate Yule Log

Pies and pastry: All-Butter Pie Dough, Pecan Pie, Pumpkin Pie, Mince Pies

Yeast breads: Soft Dinner Rolls, Overnight Cinnamon Rolls (made the night before, baked on Christmas morning)

New Year's Eve: Cheese Gougères, frozen ahead and baked when guests arrive

Five step-by-step pages show the moves that are hard to describe in words: pie dough from cubes of butter to a blind-baked crust, royal icing and the 15-second test, rolling a yule log, cutting cinnamon rolls evenly, and choux pastry.

Before you bake

Six short pages on the things that cause most failed bakes: the kit (and the pans in the book drawn to the same scale), measuring flour (a scooped cup can hold a third more than a spooned one), butter that is cold, soft or melted, your oven, food safety (raw dough, raw eggs, the 2-hour rule for pies and cream), and ingredients on both sides of the Atlantic, including how to make pumpkin purée if you can't buy it.

What you download

• Cold Butter, Warm Oven (65 pages, PDF, US Letter, in colour, with bookmarks and a clickable contents list in your PDF reader's sidebar).

Good to know

• The recipes use US names and US large eggs; British readers are told the UK name and to use medium eggs.
• Most recipes need a scale or US measuring cups, measuring spoons, two baking sheets and parchment. A hand mixer is strongly recommended for the yule log and helps with a few others.
• Between them the recipes use wheat, eggs, milk and nuts. Snowballs, biscotti and pecan pie contain nuts.
• The pages are US Letter size. On A4 paper, print with "fit to page".
• This is a PDF download. No physical book is shipped.