Customer Reviews

Sky High: Irresistible Triple-Layer Cakes

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The tall layer cakes you see at the bakery always look so impressive sitting on a cake stand or plate and sliced with two layers of filling. Somehow the two-layer cakes I make don't quite stack up (pun intended). But most recipes for the home baker are written for two layer cakes.

This book has recipes to make those fabulously tall, triple-layer cakes. I wouldn't buy it as a first cake cookbook (Rose Levy Beranbaum's "The Cake Bible" or Nick Malgieri's "Perfect Cakes" coes to mind as better beginning cake baking cookbooks), but this book does deserve a place on the shelf if you really enjoy baking cakes and want to make the kind of cakes that will inspire "oohs" and "ahs" when you bring them to the table. There is a great variety of recipes. The recipe categories are: chocolate cakes, vanilla cakes, fruit-flavored cakes; nut and spice cakes; cakes with a world of flavor (e.g. chai, dulce de leche, black forest, blue cornmeal), and finally holiday and special occasion cakes. The last chapter has recipes for three different kinds of wedding cakes that will serve 80-100 people if you feel adventurous and want to bake a wedding cake!

Each cake recipe is followed by the recipe for a frosting and often a different filling that go with it so you don't have to flip to a separate section of the book to find the frosting or filling that will suit the cake you have chosen. The frosting choices and the cake flavors sound amazing. She covers the expected combinations: chocolate cakes with toasted coconut-pecan frosting or different types of chocolate frosting; vanilla cakes with white chocolate, white chocolate buttercream or chocolate frosting; strawberry shortcake; boston cream pie. She pumps up standard cake flavors with more adventurous frosting or filling choices (chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting and chocolate peanut butter glaze, cakes with mango mousse or peach mousse filling, apricot carrot cake; banana cake with praline filling and white chocolate ganache(!); marbled lemon blueberry butter cake. And then she pulls out the stops with cakes I can't wait to try: pina colada cake, maple walnut cake, dulce de leche cake, chocolate hazelnut cake.

The photography is fantastic, bordering on "food porn." There isn't a photo for every cake but more than half of the recipes do have photos and they will make you want to bake those cakes.

If you already do a lot of cake baking, you may be surprised (as I was) by the mixing technique. I was taught the creaming method where you first beat the butter then add the sugar and beat some more until it is fluffy, and finally add the flour and other dry ingredients alternately with the liquid ingredients. Most of the butter cake recipes in this book use the two-stage method where the butter, all the dry ingredients and some of the liquid go into the mixing bowl at the beginning and after this is beaten smooth, the eggs and remaining liquid goes in. I found this so unexpected that, after reading this technique in several of the recipes, I had to go back to the baking techniques section at the beginning of the book to find out why. The author believes "the two-stage method produces a more finely textured cake and is more dependable" than the creaming method. Now that fall is here and my kitchen isn't so hot, I'll be trying these recipes I've been drooling over and will see if I agree.

The trouble is, I've been poring over the pictures and recipes so long, I can't decide which cake to make first! My friends and family may be eating a lot of cake.

I have quite a library of cook books and this one has quickly become my favorite baking book. This book is not only visually beautiful, but the recipes are well written and easy to follow.

I certainly hope to see more books by Alisa Huntsman!

What a delightful reading experience! Sky High is well-written and a pleasure to read. Beautiful, full-page color photos accompany nearly every recipe, and the paper is sturdy and high-quality. The Baker's Notes throughout the book offer additional tips to ensure baking and frosting success.

The cakes are inventive and there were many new, delicious-sounding combinations that I am eager to try (such as chai cake with honey-ginger cream, Halloween sweet potato cake and chocolate-hazelnut gianduja cake).

Chapters include Baking Basics (a primer on ingredients and equipment), Chocolate Cakes, Vanilla Cakes, Fruit-Flavored Cakes, Nut and Spice Cakes, Cakes with a World Flavor, and Holiday and Special-Occasion Cakes.

The recipes are straightforward and easy to follow. An amateur baker armed with the chapter on baking basics and an attention to detail should be able to create any of these masterpieces (perhaps with the exception of the three wedding cakes which seem slightly challenging).

Sky High is the only cookbook you need to bake show stopping layer cakes. Before I got this book, I thought of myself as a fairly accomplished baker, but one that was slightly intimidated by the idea of a layer cake. All that sizing up recipes and icing seemed a little too hard for me--plus I was scared that after all that work the cake would ultimately just collapse on me. But after I baked a trial recipe out of Sky High that I found on a blog, I knew I had to have this book and that it would lead me into a land of layer cake wonder!

The recipes in Sky High are laid out simply--so that every baker from the beginner to the semi-pro can understand them. Most of the recipes minimize fuss and use as few bowls and tools as possible. When the book introduces a new concept or ingredient, little sidebars are used to explain what the item is. In addition to the recipes, which are broken down into convenient categories like vanilla cakes, chocolate cakes, fruit cakes, etc, and the beautiful pictures, there are helpful introductory sections at the front of the book that introduce the reader to the basics of layer cake making, complete with helpful pointers like how to butter pans for different types of cakes. The layout and methods explained in this book make every type of layer cake baking from the simplest yellow birthday cake to an elaborate wedding cake (yes this book has several recipes for them!) seem like a snap.

And the results! The cakes this book produces are wonderful. So far I've made a good variety--Boston Cream Pie, Strawberry Butter Cake, Vanilla Buttermilk, Chocolate Peanut Butter with Chocolate Peanut Butter Ganache, as well as several of the icings and all have been delicious and show stopping. People literally gasp when I unveil one of these cakes because they can't believe that I made it by myself, at home, and that I'm not a professional.

So if you're looking for a book to help you make great layer cakes that look and taste fantastic without needing to go to pastry school first, this is the book for you. Seriously, this book is worth it!

This is a very beautiful cook book,the pictures and all the how to do information really helps me out and makes me want to bake these enticing cakes.It will make for very nice hostess gifts over the coming Holiday Season. The cakes look very professional, but even a non baker like me can bake one..truly amazing!

The recipes in this book come out very delicious! I would recommend!! The seller shipped very fast thanks!!

This is a great book for people who love to make cakes. The recipes are pretty easy to follow and the pictures are gorgeous. Many of the flavour combinations are very creative and unique, but the book also includes classic flavours such as black forest and pina colada. If you like to make impressive-looking cakes, get this book!

I bought this book after getting addicted to [...] because she has made several references to it. It has some incredible recipes with very detailed explanations, and a section at the beginning of the book that goes into specifics about certain ingredients. For example, which chocolate to buy, why cake flour is better than regular flour for certain recipes, and which ingredients you need to spend the extra money on for a better outcome. I recently made the marbled lemon-blueberry butter cake with lemon buttercream frosting for a group of friends and I couldn't be happier with the results. I prefer to cook rather than bake, but this book was very detailed and I turned out a very professional looking cake that was simply delicious. I highly recommend it.

The instructions for these cakes are very clear and breaks even the most complicated cake into simple, easy-to-follow steps. I'm certainly neither a novice baker nor a pastry chef; however, due to the simplicity of the instructions I feel like I can tackle even the most difficult cakes with ease. I have made the German chocolate cake with spectacular results. I am sure that the rest of the recipes will prove equally smashing.

I love this book for inspiration and for the beautiful photography. The chocolate-peanut butter cake is delicious... peanut butter ganache... who knew? I want to love the whole book because Loveless is a great restaurant. But I have to knock off a couple of stars for incomplete recipes. If you want to produce a cake exactly like in the photo, here and there ingredients and garnishes are left off, things just aren't quite right, as mentioned by other reviewers.

I knocked off two stars for the miserable dulce de leche cake. Perhaps there's a reason this cake is only shown whole and not sliced. I wish I'd checked bloggers' reviews before trying this the day of a bake sale. It was an absolute failure -- every layer sank and the texture was like eating a kitchen sponge, not a sponge cake -- chewy yet granular, with an odd bubbly appearance, refusing to come off the parchment. Grr... I should have trusted my instincts when I read the list of ingredients.

I will grant you that the dulce de leche icing (basically DDL mixed with whipping cream) is amazing, but seriously, don't torture yourselves by making DDL from scratch. Buy it and save a couple of hours.