Customer Reviews

Hey There, Cupcake! 35 Yummy Fun Cupcake Recipes for All Occasions

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

If you are looking for inspiration, thie cover of this book will suffice. I often make cupcakes for kids' events, and got a few new ideas.

However, Ms Crespo violates rule number one for excellent food books: the cupcakes pictured are not always made according to the directions she gives.

I've already run across two examples. First, the Panda cupcakes (and other cupcakes with a white frosting base) are not made with vanilla buttercream frosting as stated. This frosting is cream-to-light-yellow in color since it is made with yellow butter and brown vanilla extract. The crisply white frosting in the photos is simply not vanilla buttercream. Second, the directions for the Crop Circle cupcakes calls for the cupcake to be frosted entirely, then scraped away. It does not take a cake expert to see that the example in the photo is not made that way--the frosting was piped on in a circular pattern, not scraped away at all.
These issues aren't so egregious, but undermine the basic premise of the book (which is that these are cupcakes that you, too, can make at home). I would recommend that the interested buyer simply look at the examples shown on the cover for inspiration, and use their own ingenuity, rather than purchase the book.

I fell in love with this book when I had only seen a brief booklet of its photos. How can one resist a cupcake that's shaped like a flower, with a bee pollinating it? Or the koala and panda cupcakes, which are my absolute favorites. I don't even bake, but I still adore this book, and am happy to report that a friend made the panda and koala cupcakes for my birthday and they were just as adorable and delicious as they looked. Clare Crespo is a true food genius and I'd recommend this book for kids and adults of all ages. If you are ever feeling down, one look at Hey There, Cupcake! is sure to cheer you up. The photos and recipes are creative and cheerful and truly do the delicous treat that is the cupcake justice. Eat up!

`Hey There, Cupcake!' by culinary writer, Clare Crespo answers the burning question of where can I find a good cupcake recipe when I need one. This is actually the second cupcake book I am reviewing and I am happy to have both; however, if asked, I will definitely recommend Ms. Crespo's opus over `The Artful Cupcake' by Marcianne Miller.

First and foremost is the fact that Ms. Crespo's book is simply more fun, and I suspect that is what cupcakes are all about, aside from being, in Ina Garten's words `a delivery system for icing'. Both books are a bit light on recipes for the `cake' half of the cupcake team. Neither has a recipe of, for example, a carrot cake cupcake. I have also just noticed that neither has an index, although you will probably not really miss it, unless you happen to be looking for a carrot cake cupcake recipe.

Ms. Miller is less a culinary writer than a `crafts' writer, as I pointed out in detail in my review of her book. Oddly, `The Artful Cupcake' has a lot more general information on cupcake tools, general techniques, and ingredients. Ms. Miller handles the writing on baking and the cupcake designs are actually done by visiting crafts people. So, Ms. Miller is more of an editor than a true author. Ms. Crespo, on the other hand, seems to have done all the writing and cupcake designing chores on her book. As proclaimed by her subtitle, '35 Yummy Fun Cupcake Recipes for All Occasions', I repeat that Ms. Crespo's book is simply more fun. Among other things, this means it is a much better book for younger bakers. In fact, while Clare does not push this point too much, there is a sense about the book that it was written for a young audience, without actually talking down to the reader.

Aside from fun, one excellent advantage of Ms. Crespo's book is the fact that it does offer a lot of designs for specific occasions, especially specific occasions not generally covered by other pastry design books such as a knitting party (Ball of Yarn, Needle and Thread), New Years Eve (Clocks), atypical Halloween (Brain, Buried Alive, Eyeball, Brain), graduation (Brain, Coin), Superbowl (play-off) and so on.

Unlike some of Ms. Miller's designs, most of the decorations by Ms. Crespo are relatively easy, making excellent use of the kind of props you will find in a well-stocked craft store. I got the sense that these designs are very similar to the kind of skill and sense of humor we find behind some of Thomas Keller's more famous dishes where one kind of dish is made out to look like another, as with his famous doughnuts and coffee dish. Speaking of which, there is even a cupcake here that does an excellent job of masquerading as a cup of coffee, if served in a plausibly heavy white diner mug.

The book begins with a simple recipe for THE classic cupcake with white crumb and a vanilla butter cream icing, tinted pink, with a cherry on top. If I were teaching from this book, I would definitely encourage students to do this first. All cupcakes in the book are based on ten (10) cake recipes and six frosting recipes. This means that if you master a fair number of these sixteen recipes, you are well on your way to impressing friends and family with great cupcake improvisations.

My only reservation about the instructions in the book are that some directions for the decorating schemes would have been greatly improved by a few simple diagrams, especially if the book is to be tackled by young adults. It took me at least two or three tries to adequately visualize how one was to accomplish the design from the words in the directions. Compliments to Ms. Miller for providing such illustrations on a few of her more difficult designs.

As both of these books are relatively inexpensive, especially with a reasonable discount, I recommend them both. Ms. Miller's designs are much more suitable for grown-up occasions while Ms. Crespo's designs work much better for kids as both audience and sous chef to an adult who knows their way around a bag of King Arthur.

Highly recommended for original, entertaining cupcake designs.

When I first flipped through the pages of this book, it was like I was looking at an art book. The pictures are so good! My friend made some of the cupcakes from the book for my birthday and they were fantastic! The recipes are creative and easy.

"Hey There Cupcake!" is not so much a cookbook as it a book filled with instructions on how to make cupcakes special. But boy does it ever succeed in what it sets off to do.

Author Claire Crespo starts off with some helpful tips for making cupcakes, and then shares some basic recipes - 10 for cupcakes and 6 for frosting.

Then the fun REALLY begins. The rest of the book is filled with 35 specialty cakes designed to make it fun to serve these traditional kid favorite desserts. Crespo presents innovative ways to decorate the cakes, using your basic cupcake ingredients, a few extras here and there, and some imagination.

Some of her innovative and stylish work include "Asprin Cupcakes" (basic cupcakes with a fondant topping with a crease down the middle); "Pina Colada cupcakes" (cupcakes stacked three high, separated by whipped cream, in a pina colada glass); "Crop Circle cupcakes (chocolate cupcakes decorated with a fanned out green frosting, and complemented with a tiny plastic tractor and cow); and my favorite, "Bleeding Hearts cupcakes" (basic cupcakes filled with raspberry jelly, cut into an irregular shape and decorated to look like a heart with red frosting as a background and blue veins stretching across it).

This is the kind of book that can be enjoyed by anyone interested in cake decorating, in making cakes and pies, but most especially, folks and their children. The Baseball cupcakes would be particularly an easy cake for kids to help frost and make for a kids party, and some of the others would be great for a whole group of kids to make at such a party.

Crespo obviously spent a lot of time thinking about each of the innovative designs (I love the look of the Sushi cupcakes, which really DO look like sushi), and it's obvious that she loves to make food fun. And with "Hey There Cupcake!" at your side when you're baking, no matter what your age or what you're usually into making in the kitchen, you're bound to have lots of fun making them.

Great book many good ideas, out grandchildren have enjoyed the variety of cupcakes and enjoy looking through the book and picking out which ones to make.

Finally there are some books to be found that have both cute and classy ideas for cupcakes!

This book stands out for the cute ideas it offers for decorating cupcakes in a way that all kids will love to eat and look at, and adults will love to make. It holds several fresh and new ideas that I haven't come across before in my collection of baking and cake decorating books.
The cupcake flowers with bees on it are one of my favorites, as are the cub cupcakes. The mushroom cupcakes photographed in the woods look fantastic too.

The reason I am giving this book 4 stars, is that I ordered the book 'the artful cupcake' by Mrs. M. Miller at the same time and was so impressed by the way this book turned a simple cupcake into a show stopping dessert (but also has ideas for presenting it as a more simple treat) that it was hard to beat.

If you're aiming to please children get 'hey there cupcake', if you're looking to wow adults, get Mrs. Miller's book.

This book is so much fun. Say goodbye to boring cupcakes. The ideas are SO cute that you'll want to try your hand at almost all of them. I need to make more friends so I have more birthdays to bake cupcakes for. Warning, though, the decorations aren't always easy and some prior cake decorating experience is a help. She offers her own cupcake and frosting recipes, but you can also do it the lazy way with a box mix if you're going for presentation over taste, or use your own recipe for special dietary needs. My wife and I made the sushi cupcakes for a friend's birthday (shreded coconut for the rice, green Fruit Roll Ups for seaweed, and Sweedish fish candies, etc) and presented them to her on Japanese dishes we'd bought. It was a big hit and made her very happy. These creative cupcakes are a great gift - and one from the heart - for that person who is hard to buy for. Make them for someone you love or get the book for a person who loves to bake.

After buying Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World: 75 Dairy-Free Recipes for Cupcakes that Rule, I was inspired and eager to try some new recipes (I'm not vegan, after all!). I was very disappointed with this book; it's very light on recipes, and heavy on elaborate, time-consuming decorations that typically involve ingredients that will either be hard to find in your local grocery stores (so you'll need to buy them through the mail), or are inconvenient (such as all-green Fruit Roll-ups). The emphasis is on using basic cake recipes and dressing them up with lots on processed candies and artificially colored and flavored additions; the resulting combination is a cupcake that looks too good to eat, and tastes like an odd mishmash of the various decorative components used when you do. In spite of the title, this is really not a recipe book, but is more of a funky home-decorator's guide to cupcakes.

Some of these cupcakes are absolutely gorgeous; others seem rather random, or as though the author was running out of ideas in the end (several pages devoted to clock-face cupcakes?). While they may be "kid-friendly" to eat, most will not be kid-friendly to make, given the precision necessary to recreate the elaborate designs. You're also going to need some new tips for your pastry bag to frost a lot of these. A big problem that I had with this book is that the designs are so elaborate that it quickly becomes impractical to make more than a few of them; if you've got a bake sale coming up, or need to make a large batch for a potluck, many of these recipes won't be practical.

Many other reviewers seem to have loved this book, but I found it to be a bit of a disappointment. The author is clearly a very creative person, and I will certainly be trying some of the "recipes" as I expand my cupcake resume'. However, the emphasis on image over flavor and the time-consuming nature of a lot of these will probably keep the book on the shelf more often than on my counter-top. Definitely give this one a test-drive at your local library first.

I think I found my new favorite book. I make and sell customized cakes [...] so it is absolutely amazing to see all of these ideas I never would have thought of!