Kate's Cake Decorating: Techniques and Tips for Fun and Fancy Cakes Baked with Love [Hardcover]

Kate Sullivan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2004

Kate's Cake Decorating features thorough instructions for more than 20 cakes, as well as information on how to create your own one-of-a-kind, filled with love, I've never seen anything like it before cake.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Kate Sullivan's wedding and party cakes have been featured in numerous magazines, including Oprah, the New York Times, Self, and Time Out New York, as well as on VH1 and in Broadway theater. She lives in New York City.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Quarry Books (October 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592530702
• ISBN-13: 978-1592530700
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 9.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #139,197 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unique and creative!, October 8, 2006

By 

Sistama Girlfrien "White Chocolate Cake" (Somewhere, Over The Rainbow) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Kate's Cake Decorating: Techniques and Tips for Fun and Fancy Cakes Baked with Love (Hardcover)

I'm a professional baker and have purchased many cake decorating books, including nearly all of Colette's books. I absolutely loved this book! I like the way photos instead of drawn illustrations are used for the "how to" part of each cake. She shows you step by step, how to make her unique cakes. And yes, there are some slight imperfections...it's a cake for cryin' out Larry. Her photos are great. They are real! Not airbrushed photos. If you go to a wedding, look at the cake...really look, there are always little flaws. They are covered with flowers or facing the back of the room. Kate makes cakes that are actually feasable...and cost effective. I've taken classes with some famous cake makers and their techniques although informative, are quite laborous and time consuming. I don't have that kind of time. Simple techniques, elegant, unique design. Very inspirational.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Loved this book!, August 29, 2005

By 

JSeymour (Florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Kate's Cake Decorating: Techniques and Tips for Fun and Fancy Cakes Baked with Love (Hardcover)

I like Kate's style, which is beautiful and modern. This is a great how-to book which shows us how to use the latest and neatest products, such as shimmer and pearl dusts. She shows basic techniques from from icing a cake to more challenging marzipan figures. There are a good number of projects that are well organized and easy to understand. For each one she gives us a itemized list of equipment and decorations needed for each project, timing tips, and illustrates how to make them. There is also a list of resources for cool supplies and tools. She shares her recipes for chocolate and buttercakes, ganache, buttercream, fondant, and other icings. I've made some of them and have gotten rave reviews. I have taken the Wilton courses and was looking for a book that could get me to the next level. This fit the bill perfectly and has opened up a whole new world for me!

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Controversial Sampler, June 21, 2006

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Kate's Cake Decorating: Techniques and Tips for Fun and Fancy Cakes Baked with Love (Hardcover)

This is the book that has split the community of cake decorators right down the middle, from stem to stern. Half of us think that Sullivan's craft, while passionate and inspiring, shows signs of sloppy, careless finish, while the other half holds her up as the exemplar of a new kind of fun styling that hasn't been seen in decades. I decided to make up my mind by ordering two copies of her book, one to give to my mother, one to keep for myself. We challenged each other to find the best and worst recipes and tips in Sullivan's opus.

Yes, the color photography is sometimes garish, nothing like the elegant Cecil Beaton-inspired photographs that sparkle and illuminate the "cakebooks" of her close contemporary Lindy Smith, whose brittle, icy designs have given her the reputation of a modern-day Klimt in frosting. And yet Smith could never have completed, nor even conceived of, some of Sullivan's neo-expressionistic "portrait cakes," such as the one of Elvis which is wiggy enough to have been featured permanently at Graceland, maybe sunk in intaglio form right into Elvis' tombstone. One responds to the sheer frivolity and nuttiness and yes, the love that Sullivan exudes from every pore of her body. Even her somewhat portentous crush on fondant shows us that, deep underneath her smooth surface, great feelings roil up within.

Her tips are always helpful, and most of the recipes are rather good, very rich of course, but you don't spread gold dust over cream cheese filling and expect a low calorie plate. This is cake, after all, and it's supposed to be bad for you! These cakes might have decorated the Technicolor visions of Maria Montez and Jon Hall in their Universal classics of the 1940s such as COBRA WOMAN and GYPSY WILDCAT. My mother and I both agreed that there are no bad recipes, just bad critics.