Amazon.com description: Product Description: The perfect gift for any cook! A two-book bundle of Dorie Greenspan’s essential cookbooks: Baking and Around My French Table.

When Julia Child told Dorie Greenspan, "You write recipes just the way I do," she paid her the ultimate compliment. Julia’s praise was echoed by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, which referred to Dorie’s "wonderfully encouraging voice" and "the sense of a real person who is there to help should you stumble." Both Around My French Table and Baking: From My Home to Yours are filled with hundreds of recipes, generous helpings of background information, abundant stories, and hundreds of professional hints. Around My French Table includes many superb renditions of the great classics: a glorious cheese-domed onion soup, a spoon-tender beef daube, and the "top-secret" chocolate mousse recipe that every good Parisian cook knows—but won’t reveal. Scores of other recipes are remarkably easy: a cheese and olive quick bread, a three-star chef’s Basque potato tortilla made with a surprise ingredient (potato chips), and an utterly satisfying roast chicken for "lazy people." In Baking: From My Home to Yours, her masterwork, Dorie applies the lessons from three decades of experience to her first and real love: home baking.

The 300 recipes will seduce a new generation of bakers, whether their favorite kitchen tools are a bowl and a whisk or a stand mixer and a baker’s torch. From homey to special occasion, these recipes are keepers. Dorie’s favorite raisin swirl bread, big spicy muffins from her stint as a baker in a famous New York City restaurant, French chocolate brownies (a Parisian pastry chef begged for the recipe), a dramatic black and white cake for a "wow" occasion, and Pierre Hermé's extraordinary lemon tart are just a few of the delights in this book.