Mention Grand Central Bakery to a Seattle or Portland native and they’ll light up as they tell you about gooey, jam-filled buttermilk biscuits, insanely flaky pies and pastries, and flavor-packed whole wheat cinnamon rolls. Now these much-loved recipes are available to home bakers for the first time, accompanied by easy-to-follow pointers on baking breakfast and brunch, cookies, fruit desserts, cakes, pies, and more. This collection of more than 100 recipes draws on a treasury of Grand Central staples and family favorites. The Grand Central Baking Book offers detailed, delicious recipes for some of the bakery’s best-loved goodies, along with technique-driven workshops offering in-depth explanations of baking methods and helpful shortcuts from seasoned bakers. On page after page, Piper Davis, the daughter of Grand Central’s founder and now the company’s cuisine manager, generously lets home bakers in on all the family secrets that have made Grand Central the first morning stop for locals since 1972. Distilling more than thirty-five years of innovation, experience, and genuine love of good, fresh food into simple, accessible recipes, Piper Davis and award-winning pastry chef Ellen Jackson invite you to make popular Grand Central Bakery goods in your own kitchen. “At last, we have a long overdue glimpse into one of the Pacific Northwest’s best bakeries. This book is comprehensive, fun, and enticing!” –Cory Schreiber, founder of Wildwood and coauthor of Rustic Fruit Desserts “The recipes in this book are just like Grand Central Bakery: brilliant but not flashy, tasty but not self-absorbed, and full of homey charm. You will be smitten!” –Tom Douglas, chef-owner of Dahlia Lounge, Lola, and Serious Pie, and author of Tom Douglas’ Seattle Kitchen “There is a familial quality to good baking, a no-nonsense wholesomeness with the scent of freshly baked muffins. Piper and Ellen have captured this, as well as the wonderful style and character of Grand Central Bakery favorites. This is a practical and functional book that is bound to become lovingly tattered on your shelf.” –Greg Higgins, chef-owner of Higgins Restaurant and Bar and recipient of the James Beard Award Best Chef: Northwest * 85 recipes from the Pacific Northwest's first artisan bakery and now the region's most popular bakery chain . * Named one of the top-10 bakeries in the country by Bon Appétit . * The Grand Central Baking Company serves over 30,000 customers daily in its retail and wholesale outlets, with 7,000 customers visiting the Seattle and Portland cafés each day. PIPER DAVIS is an avid baker who inherited her ease in the kitchen from her mother, Grand Central Bakery founder Gwenyth Bassetti. Piper grew up at her mother’s side in the kitchen, cooking and baking for their food-centric family. Now, as co-owner and cuisine manager of Grand Central Bakery, named one of the top-ten bakeries in the country by Bon Appétit , Piper gets to share her love of fresh seasonal food with happy customers every day. She lives in Portland, Oregon. ELLEN JACKSON is an award-winning pastry chef, food writer, and stylist who has served as a judge for the James Beard Awards. She lives in Portland, Oregon. 1: Stocking the Larder Setting up and maintaining a well-stocked larder is the first step to blending baking seamlessly into everyday life. I know many wonderful cooks who don’t bake. They say that it’s too detail oriented or requires too much special equipment, or that they simply don’t have time for it. I don’t buy that. Anyone can incorporate baking into the daily routine. Having certain basic ingredients on hand will help you avoid last-minute trips to the store, so this is a good place to start. I encourage new home bakers to develop their own thing. You might make muffins every Sunday for a month. Or maybe you’d like to stock your freezer with portioned cookie dough so you can bake cookies on impulse. Become the baker whose pie crust is legendary, or spend the summer mastering crisps and crumbles. You can set yourself up to bake your favorite treats whenever the mood strikes by having key ingredients in your larder and a couple of basic pieces of equipment in your batterie de cuisine. Then start baking regularly. It won’t be long before you develop good instincts and a feel for baking that allows you to whip up pie dough, a breakfast pastry, or a quick dessert without a second thought. Starting from Scratch Part of my job as Grand Central’s bakery cuisine manager is to educate the retail staff about our approach to baking. I always begin the discussion by asking if anyone knows what it means to “start from scratch.” It’s one of those figures of speech that everyone knows but many people have trouble putting into words. After a bit of prodding, they tentatively offer suggestions: “Homemade?” “Using only good ingredients?” “Not using any premade stuff?” “Organic?” Once they’ve wrestled with the concept, I share the term’s his