So far I've baked 28 recipes from What's for Dessert (and yes - I keep track of this via a spreadsheet in which I also give each bake a rating from 1 to 5 once complete). This is a far cry from the number of recipes I've baked from Claire Saffitz's debut cookbook (78), Dessert Person, but I feel that I've made enough headway in this one that I can give my evaluation.
I'll start off with acknowledging that this cookbook has some absolutely stellar recipes. The recipes I've given a 5 star rating to our the goat milk panna cotta with guava sauce, the classic sundae bombe, the tiramisu-y icebox cake, the mango-yogurt mousse, the malted banana upside-down cake, the hazelnut tres leches, the caramelized pear turnover, and the fried sour cherry pies. Absolutely delicious and perfect and it's worth buying the cookbook just for access to these recipes alone.
However, when I encountered a recipe in Dessert Person that made me go, "Hmph, I'm not so sure about this one, but I'll give it a try", almost every time I was at least pleasantly surprised with the result and often even blown away (looking at you mascarpone cake with red wine prunes), my experience with What's for Dessert has not been the same. Often when I have that, hmph IDK about that reaction to a recipe in this cookbook, my gut instinct turns out to be correct and the result is a letdown. The most recent flops I've had were the spiced pear charlotte with brioche and roasted lemon tart.
What's most baffling to me is that there is overlap in some of the recipes between the two cookbooks - for example both have a brownie recipe, an apple tart recipe, a lemon tart recipe, and a pie crust recipe - but the resulting product from the What's for Dessert recipe is so much worse. I have a friend who's mom recently passed away, so my partner and I made her a platter of four different brownies which included the cocoa chestnut brownies from What's for Dessert. All three of us (myself, my partner, and my friend) ranked the cocoa chestnut brownies dead last. They are pretty much the antithesis of everything I love in a brownie - cakey and dense and with too rich of a ganache. If you're going to spend the money on chestnuts you're better off making the pear chestnut cake from Dessert Person!
After working through both cookbooks, it's obvious that Dessert Person was a passion project, and great care was taken with the recipe development and testing, but that same level of care was not given for Claire's second cookbook. And I don't totally fault her for this, I'm sure she was under a lot of pressure to churn out a follow up quickly, and with recipes that are oriented towards less experienced home bakers without access to a stand mixer. Despite its flaws, What's for Dessert still deserves a solid 4-star rating, but if you're like me and was expecting another Dessert Person masterpiece, think again.