490 of 500 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Challenge, April 11, 2001
This review is from: The Cake Bible (Hardcover)
While it's difficult to add much to the other reviews of "The Cake Bible", I do have a couple of thoughts that might help resolve some of the conflicting reports. Like a few of the other reviewers, I have found this to be a frustrating book, even for someone with culinary training. Let me make one thing clear -- I really want to like it. The book is comprehensive and authoritative, and the author, Rose Levy Beranbaum, tries very hard to communicate. What isn't covered in the text is usually addressed in the extensive margin notes or footnotes. With strengths like that, it would seem impossible for any recipe to fail.
But, many recipes do fail, sometimes spectacularly. How is that possible? The reasons are many and varied. First, my sense is that the recipes themselves are fragile. While ingredient measures are expressed in precise units (you'd better own a scale), the instructions must be executed to the letter. No step can be compromised; no corner can be cut. Exact pan sizes and oven temperatures must be used. The ingredients are carefully balanced. If you're off by just a little, the cake will fail. Hence, I don't approach the recipes in this book with the sort of unhesitating confidence I would like. It often takes several tries to get a cake right.
Second, the recipes don't take kindly to substitutions. Once, I came up a little short on sour cream and tried to substitute some plain yogurt in the Sour Cream Coffee Cake. The recipe wasn't robust enough to accommodate the additional water provided by the yogurt, and the cake fell. To make these cakes, you need to triple-check the ingredients list before you start.
Third, only the highest quality ingredients can be used. The Mousseline Buttercream is a good example. Since it uses only egg whites instead of yolks or whole eggs, and since there isn't much sugar, the only flavor notes come from the butter. Anything less that the highest quality will result in a final product that is greasy and horrible. And the additional liquor flavoring in many recipes is not optional. It is often required to compensate for the relative lack sugar.
Finally, the author's encouragement notwithstanding, the Showcase Cakes are legitimately complicated. Each of them has a number of components, some with multiple sub-components, and each cake takes several days to construct. The Blueberry Swan Lake, for example, calls for 2 meringue swans with piped whipped cream feathers. The White Lilac Nostalgia cake requires dozens of crystallized lilac blossoms, each prepared carefully by hand. And I'd love to see anyone's first crack at the red chocolate roses and 20 chocolate rose leaves required for the Bittersweet Royale Torte.
In fairness, however, it should be noted that some of the fundamental recipes are real breakthroughs (or at least they were when the book was written in 1988). The Moist Chocolate Genoise, for example, uses bar chocolate instead of the cocoa. The cocoa butter in the chocolate replaces the clarified butter that would normally be added to a cake of this type. The result is a chocolate genoise unlike any other I've ever tasted. While many are stiff and dry, this cake is tender and moist. In addition, the Neo-Classic Buttercream offers a worthwhile shortcut to the preparation of the sugar syrup.
A special bonus is the wedding cake section. These pages thoroughly describe the construction of a 'standard' wedding cake, right down to the amount of buttercream required for each layer. Recipes are offered for yellow and chocolate butter cake, yellow and chocolate genoise, and cheesecake. Every step along the way is described in detail, and the designs, while challenging, are generally more accessible that those from, say, Colette Peters or Dede Wilson.
In sum, while it's easy to make a decent cake, it's a big step to the next level. What this book underscores is the amount of preparation, concentration, and effort it takes to make an exceptional cake. If that is your goal, then this book could well offer the road map you're looking for.
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83 of 84 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Taught Me How to Bake a Cake, September 26, 2005
This review is from: The Cake Bible (Hardcover)
Until I bought this book several years ago, I could NOT bake a cake. The more I have learned about the science of baking, the more I have come to realize that you CAN'T make a good cake from the average recipe in the average cookbook--they don't know what they're doing--and any author that routinely calls for all-purpose flour in her cakes obviously has such low standards as not to be trusted in anything she writes.
I have not tried the "advanced" cakes, since these are not my interest, but the butter cakes have all worked (and worked the first time, I might add) and tasted great. These recipes (and a few from Cook's Illustrated) are behind my reputation as an excellent cake baker. The only recipes I would change are the chocolate butter cakes. I just think that baking soda makes a better tasting and textured chocolate cake than baking powder, but I realize this is personal taste. Rose's banana cake is wonderful; however, I pour the batter into a loaf pan to make banana bread. I can't tell you the number of people that have said it is the best banana bread they've ever eaten!
One very important tip that I'm sure Rose didn't realize she was teaching is the addition of granular lecithin to cakes. I noticed in a couple of her recipes that she called for white chocolate and that these cakes would rise a bit more because of the lecithin in them. That got me to thinking that The Baker's Catalogue (King Arthur Flour) offered granular lecithin, so why not try it? It works! You can also find it in some health food stores. I've not tried the liquid form in cakes since it measures differently, so buy the granular. My rule of thumb is 1/2 tsp. per cup of flour. Lecithin is an emulsifier and enables the fat to mix better with the rest of the ingredients producing a higher, somewhat lighter, and springier cake. In other words, your cakes come out acting like you used shortening instead of butter--but you get butter's wonderful flavor. This trick works beautifully in Rose's recipes as does adding a tablespoon of canola oil per cup of flour for extra moisture. I always do this with every cake recipe, no matter who wrote it. The cakes are not heavier and still have that all-butter flavor--just moister since vegetable oil stays liquid even when the cake is baked.
Overall, I really like this book. The main reason it doesn't get the full measure of stars in my rating is the poor binding. I've had two copies, and they've both separated from the spine; it starts at the front with the photographs then spreads. Cheap!
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70 of 71 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic, August 11, 2000
This review is from: The Cake Bible (Hardcover)
I'm not an experienced baker and although I don't mind baking, I will admit that I like eating cake more than I do baking it. However the recipes from The Cake Bible have brought me so many rave reviews that I look forward to making them. For a special occasion several years ago I made a three-tiered Golden Genoise with a raspberry buttercream and marzipan roses, and there are people who still marvel about it. I've also made the Black Forest cake, the Triple Chocolate cake, and the Cordon Rose Cream cheesecake with great success. The coffeecake and the blueberry buttermilk pancakes are now family classics, and for my own birthday I always make the Perfect All-American Chocolate Butter cake with a Milk Chocolate buttercream. These are real cakes, similar to great ones I've had in Vienna, London, and New York, that rely on the flavor of the ingredients rather than the overwhelming sweetness prevalent in the typical American cakes. Most of them do use a lot of butter and eggs, and there's no margarine, powdered icing sugar, or artificial flavourings in these, so be forewarned. I find them no more difficult than recipes from any other book, but the end result is light-years ahead. The fancier versions of the decorated cakes can be intimidating since my manual dexterity is somewhere below that of a dyslexic orangutan's, but even if my decorations aren't picture perfect they have a kind of funky charm, and still taste good. In any case, unless it's for a special event, it's not necessary to make them fancy. The recipes have been constructed from scratch so that the ingredients and techniques make perfect sense chemically, rather than having been recopied from existing ones. It's difficult to look at other cake recipes now.
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