Cakes: 1001 Classic Recipes: 1001 AUTHENTIC RECIPES [Hardcover]

Reader'S Digest (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 9, 2003

You'll find 1,001 delicious cake recipes-from family favorites to exotic cakes from around the world-in this mouthwatering cookbook. Step-by-step instructions make baking perfect cakes foolproof, and helpful hints and tips guide the baker to the best results. Each recipe is ranked by difficulty, from super-easy to the more challenging.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With recipes ranging from Basic Butter Cake to Cornflake Cheesecake with Champagne Filling, this book makes a comprehensive and inspiring addition to any home baker's library. Over a thousand recipes are split into 16 categories (with a special section on frostings and fillings), including pound cakes, muffins, dacquoises, no-bake cakes and tarts. Each recipe includes information about the cake's preparation, baking times, difficulty level and, in an unusual and helpful addition, its staying power: from a day for many ice-cream cakes to several months for fruitcakes. But it's the inclusion of dozens of recipes for international specialty cakes that makes this mammoth collection remarkable. Bardi (The Encyclopedia of Italian Cooking) includes a number of traditional Italian recipes, such as Spiced Italian Fruitcake with Chocolate Glaze and a unique Italian Potato Cake with raisins and pine nuts. Also notable is the Thai Birthday Cake, which is made with rice, and several Peruvian desserts such as Peruvian Baba, which uses pisco, a Peruvian grape brandy. There are, however, a few flaws in the book's organization. The index is arranged only by ingredients, with no entries for titles. While this is helpful when looking for ways to use passion fruit (8 recipes), it makes finding recipes for traditional French cakes such as the Senateur or the Opera difficult for readers who don't already know their ingredients. Also, some recipes, such as Cinnamon-Apple Muffins, are not listed in the index at all. Nonetheless, the book, which contains at least one color photograph per page, is a pleasure to browse through and its photo-demonstrations of complex techniques, such as making jelly rolls, make it an excellent introduction to baking cakes, with recipes that will appeal to both beginning and advanced bakers. 500+ color photographs.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 360 pages
• Publisher: Readers Digest; 2nd Printing edition (October 9, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0762104031
• ISBN-13: 978-0762104031
• Product Dimensions: 11.1 x 9.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #405,373 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars For Experienced Bakers Only., March 21, 2006

By 

jerry i h (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Cakes: 1001 Classic Recipes: 1001 AUTHENTIC RECIPES (Hardcover)

This book is a valuable collection of Italian cakes that you probably have never eaten, much less even heard of before. On the down side, half of the recipes in this book simply do not work as written.

If you are an experienced baker, this book is an invaluable encyclopedia of Italian cakes. Each and every recipe that you can get to work from this book will be a revelation to your dining guests, in that they are neither German, Austrian, American, nor French in influence. The combination of flavors are uniquely Italian, underappreciated in this country, and therefore valuable and sure to amaze and surprise your diners. You are on your own, however, in choosing those recipes that will work, and being able to get faulty or incomplete recipes to work correctly.

If you are an average home cook, however, avoid this book. There is no educational information, and no helpful hints. This is a big problem, in that many recipes are rather tricky and require experience to pull off correctly. Almost all recipes need additional techniques to do correctly, and these techniques are not spelled out (an experience baker, however, should be able to supply the missing bits). The recipes appear to be a simple cut and paste affair, cribbing from many sources far and wide, but without all the explanatory stuff you would normally expect to get in addition to just the recipe.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Just browsing through the book makes my mouth water, October 17, 2004

By 

Harold McFarland (Florida) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cakes: 1001 Classic Recipes: 1001 AUTHENTIC RECIPES (Hardcover)

This book is typical of the superb quality you expect from Reader's Digest publications. Excellent photography, clear instructions, all the information you want is included at the end of each recipe - number of servings, preparation time, cooking time, skill level, and number of days it will keep. All cookbooks should include this information along with the recipes. This is the way a cookbook should be done.

The book includes lots of traditional cake recipes as well as recipes you are not likely to find anywhere else without a great deal of effort. Some of the recipes include Chocolate nut strudel, banana chocolate strudel, chocolate chip-amaretto cake, double chocolate brownies, Pennsylvania Dutch Funnel Cakes, and even Baklava.

Since the entire book is about cakes, it is organized by the type of cake recipe. Those types are butter cakes, pound cakes, chocolate cakes, fresh fruit and nut cakes, dried fruit & nut cakes, sponge cakes, festive cakes, meringue cakes, strudels, charlottes, cheesecakes, no-bake cakes, tarts, small cakes & muffins, yeast cakes, special cakes, fillings & frostings.

Some people will have a problem with the small typeface of the ingredients list. Make sure you can read it before ordering the book. Other than that one small item, this is the epitome of the craft of cookbooks. Cakes: 1001 Classic Recipes from Around the World is highly recommended.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cakes Extraordinaire, August 26, 2005

By 

Anonymous "booksandcookies" (Charleston, IL USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Cakes: 1001 Classic Recipes: 1001 AUTHENTIC RECIPES (Hardcover)

This is a terrific cookbook specializing in cakes. The print is VERY easy to read unless you require extremely Large Print books. I have less than perfect vision and find this book very easy to read. Like all Reader's Digest books, this is excellent quality. Wide variety of cakes, instructions are clear, lots of great photographs. Many, many cakes. The book is large but not outlandishly large; it just has a lot of cake recipes - which is a great thing in a Cake cookbook! Great buy!