Customer Reviews

Great Cakes: Over 250 Recipes to Bake, Share, and Enjoy

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

My favorite recipe in this book is the Carrot Pineapple Cake. What I also like is that the recipes respond well to tweeking, therefore you can make a recipe your own. The cakes have that homemade taste to them. There is also some useful info in the front about the different ingredients, which is a must for any serious baker. There are directions for decorating cakes and recipes for sauces, frosting and glazes in the back. Every recipe end with instructions on how to store the finished cake, and contains variations of the original recipe. I am a recent graduate of a professional baking and pastry program, and I can tell you that I use this book for cakes more so than my textbook. I took away one star for the lack of photos. There are some in the middle of the book as well as some illustrations in the decorating section, but I usually like more photos in my books. But don't let that stop you from buying this book. This is my bible for cakes.
NOTE: Taste the batter before you bake, I find that I have to add a little sugar to the recipes.

Every recipe in this book is exceptional, or at least every one I have tried so far. Each recipe has very thorough instructions, so that even the more elaborate recipes end up being simple and easy to follow.

Sorry to contradict the other positive reviews, but I am not a fan of this book. The instructional information I did find interesting and I did take notes before going to the recipes as I know it's important to understand the authors philosophy and how it translates into the recipes. However, despite my own personal baking experience, I did not have good luck with many of the recipes and believe there are much better options out there. I also believe many of the recipes are unnecessarily enhanced with odd ingredients just to make them original. Don't buy this book expecting to find great rock solid recipes for common cakes. The few it includes are not great in my opinion. Same with the frostings. My personal opinion is the book falls way short on several fronts. My advice would be to try some of the recipes found on the recipe websites. Base your choice on only the highest user ratings for each and make the tweaks to the recipes that people suggest. You will be much happier. Book wise, I would look elsewhere.

What an amazing book!! Filled with over 250 recipes of beautiful and do-able cake recipes. What an absolute steal for this recipe collection. Be forewarned: The book is not laden with photos. In the middle of the book there are eight glossy color photo pages. Photos are fun and helpful . . . but don't let that turn you off from this gem of a book. I've tried one recipe from it already, and although the recipe was challenging - it was worth every bite, and then some!

Although this cake book does not have photographs of all the cakes and usually I abstain from cookbooks that do not have photographs of all of their recipes, I was surprised to find that this is a very good book despite that. I even made a cake the banana nut cake but instead of banana I used pineapple. It was very nice but as the other reviewer said it needed some more sugar.

I have checked the two reviews posted on the amazon regarding this book before purchasing it. The previous buyers did state that the book didnt have any photos (although i am a picture type of person who would try new recipes after seeing photos), however the book overall seems to have variety of easy to follow cake recipes although i havent tried one yet.

I enjoyed reading the 1st part: instructions-trouble shooting problems- and baking ware tools, and have realised some mistakes i have done when baking in the past, and I am planning to use the book as a guidline when baking cakes, i really wish if there were photos of all cakes just to have an idea of what the end result should've looked like.