Customer Reviews

Cupcakes!

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Someone (author? editor? photographer? all three?) isn't clear on the concept that this is a COOKBOOK. Granted, due to budgetary restraints, some cookbooks can't photograph every recipe. Problem is, that this one could have. We have full-page artistic illustrations of mixing bowls, piping tubes, beaters, 2 pages of empty cupcake pans, and 3 full pages showing paper cupcake liners. We have one page showing three (unidentified) cupcakes with two of them out of focus. If all those full pages that were dedicated to artistic fulfillment and depth of field exercises, had instead each shown 2 or 3 cupcakes each, every recipe in the book could have been presented. Captioning would have been nice, too. One cannot assume that everyone knows what a "vanilla cheesecake crunch top cupcake" looks like, but I think that it should be safe to assume that everybody knows what a paper cupcake liner looks like!

So many cookbooks are photo-oriented, only to make the book better looking. You see props and garnishes that are never mentioned or described, leaving you to wonder "if that flower is a sugar-coated pansy or porcelain" or "Was that cake stand vintage?"... that sort of thing. Well, this book is textually detailed down to the last dot so the lack of a photo for each recipe is a sad omission. You will want to make the cupcakes, sure, but only the ones with pictures because you have no clue how the other ones should look. If one is going to describe how to roll gumdrops out and curl them into tiny flowers, show a picture please. What's there looks gorgeous in this book but what is missing is missing in the biggest way.

I bake all the time, and have even taken a couple of courses; but the recipes in this book are all flawed! None of the cupcakes baked accordingly, so use this book as an inspiration and not a cookbook. FYI: Martha Stewart Baking Handbook and The Joy of Baking have great yellow and chocolate cake recipes that work all the time.

I have this book as well as two other of Elinor Klivans cookbooks and everything I make from the other two come out perfect. The cookies are heaven. Anyway, with this book I just don't know what I am doing wrong. Every batch I have made the cupcakes sink badly. I tried increasing the bake time to once I baked them for 40 minutes, not overmixing and they still sank. Maybe it is something else I am doing wrong, they just seem too wet. They taste delicious but visually they look horrible. I am an avid mix cupcake baker and to have these scratch ones always fail makes me very unhappy.

I actually like the pictures in this book and find it a nice book to read but I have found, as other people have, that the basic cupcake recipe for Chocolate Sour Cream Cupcakes does NOT work. I have tried it three times and (once totally ignoring the book method and using a method from another tried and tested book) found that each time the cupcakes sink and form huge craters that leave the cakes unedible. I am an avid cookbook collector and cook and have never found this problem before. Such a shame as the book looks so nice.

I really enjoyed this book, the recipes were well explained & easy to follow.
The cakes went down very well with the everyone at work.
All the recipes I tried worked well not one flop.
The only issue I had with the book was trying to convert the measurements to suite Australia ie 1 stick of butter = 6 tbsp, Luckily I had a conversion table in an English Cookbook otherwise it could have got quite messy
Other than that I found the book to be really good

I got this book as a Christmas gift and just tried the first recipe out of it yesterday. Unfortunately, the basic chocolate cupcake recipe must not have been tested enough in the test kitchens! My cupcakes, like a lot of others who have reviewed this book, while delicious, were a visual mess. Sunken in the middle and so light that they had no strength and fell apart in my hands. I am an experienced baker, so I'll be trying them again with some modifications to see if I can fix the problems. Great ideas in here, but if one of the two the basic recipes doesn't work, then the book is flawed in one of its fundamental elements.

Wow! Who'd have thought there were this many variations on the humble cupcake? This book has so many great ideas, I went out and bought a second muffin pan. The basic chocolate batter is outstanding, and the extra-large cupcake recipes make a really impressive dessert. My favorites are the boston cream pie cupcakes and the chocolate mousse cupcakes. This is much more fun than serving a whole cake!

I have made the basic chocolate recipe twice, and both times they have failed to create that lovely round cupcake top...they come out flat at best, but more often than not they are concave. Very strange, and it can't be due to high altitude because I live on the second floor in New York City! They do taste pretty good and are very moist, but not very visually appealing.

I'm another one that tried the chocolate sour cream cupcakes and it was a disaster. They came out flat, never rose above the rim of the cupcake pan. They also were tasteless, as if it needed more chocolate. My daughter has this book and also tried the chocolate sour cream cupcakes and hers never rose either. I can't figure out what is wrong with this recipe but I can get better results from a Duncan Hines mix.