Thanks everyone for your time and advice. At this point, time I'm a little worried about purchasing any more books because I was far less concerned in doing so in the past, some good books were gotten out of that (eg: The Professional Pastry Chef by Bo Friberg, The Chocolate Bible, by Christian Teubner, Professional Baking by Wayne Gisslen, The Cake Bible by Rose L Berenbaum, The Secrets of Baking by Sherry Yard, The New International Confectioner...) and others were... a little more generic. I wouldn't dare claim I've a mastery of the basics, but I've found that things that require learning through repetition (which technically is everything I guess ) are best left to learn on the job. We make and use large amounts of things such as creme patissiere, whipped cream, bavarians, sponges, butter cakes, pate choux (we get to pipe and fill 2500+ profiteroles a week ), buttercream, puff pastry, danish pastry and things like that so rather than use up time and ingredients to gain further experience in my own time, I'd thought that perhaps I should look at other things: things that would be less likely to be produced frequently where I work and things that every pastrychef should at least have done once or twice before (eg pithiviers, dobos torte, St Honore, etc and lamingtons, apple pie, ladyfingers etc.). And that's what lead me to asking the question about the pastry 'classics' in terms of products such as a mille feuille as opposed to a component such as puff pastry. Is this going off on the wrong track? Would there be a better use of free time? Admittedly I have been eyeing 'The Patisserie of Pierre Herme' and 'The Cook's Book' for a while now though the price has held me back (moreso with the Herme). Speaking of going on the wrong track, I guess I've kind of gone off the topic a bit , should I be posting this under a new thread or will it be ok here? Theabroma: Regarding the middle/Eastern European pastry, could you please elaborate more on that? My geography was never any good and my sense of which tradition different pastry products belong to is hazy at best. Wendy: Thank you for taking a look at the 'why's' of this approach. I am a bit confused about what you're advising though. To clarify, are you suggesting that the time would be better spent finding 'the best' core recipes (by core, do you mean components such as sponges, whipped cream, etc?) or by following the recipes of highly rated pastrychefs? John DePaula: I think I must've overlooked those when I was windowshopping through the amazon.com website or perhaps gotten the price tag mixed up with a book by Yves Thuries. Would you recommended that three books be used as a set (that is, if I were to produce a finished dessert from the second volume using recipes for components not in the first volume but from another book... the outcome wouldn't be disastrous would it?)?