Oh, Go Ahead, Lick the Pages

Maida Heatter’s dessert cookbooks are so detailed in their instructions that she practically tells you when to stop sifting the flour so you can wipe off your glasses.

I discovered Ms. Heatter’s books when I was a teenager with an immense sweet tooth. I loved their exactitude, which saved me from many a kitchen catastrophe. Her writing style is precise and practical. She included suggestions like using a saltshaker to sprinkle water into pie dough to yield flakier crust, and chilling the beaters and bowl before whipping heavy cream for the fluffiest texture. God is in the details, as they say.

Fall is blockbuster season for cookbook publishers, and the 2014 crop has been heavy on baking. I found myself thinking about Ms. Heatter a lot recently as I baked my way through the rich stack that hit my desk.

There were giant, authoritative books by known authors, and smaller, quirkier books by newcomers. The best ones were able to walk a novice through the particulars of pastry science and also give innovative recipes, not just the chocolate tortes you’ve seen before.

Of all the cookbooks I tested (and when I say “tested,” I mean read in bed, bookmarked, splattered, annotated and obsessed over), the encouraging meticulousness of Dorie Greenspan’s “Baking Chez Moi” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $40) most closely recalled Ms. Heatter’s style. A recipe for gingerbread bûche de Noël — an ornate sponge cake rolled around praline filling and made to look like a snow-covered log — runs four densely packed pages.