Cakes: 1001 Classic Recipes: 1001 AUTHENTIC RECIPES (Hardcover)

by Reader'S Digest (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
With recipes ranging from Basic Butter Cake to Cornflake Cheesecake with Champagne Filling, this book makes a comprehensive and inspiring addition to any home baker's library. Over a thousand recipes are split into 16 categories (with a special section on frostings and fillings), including pound cakes, muffins, dacquoises, no-bake cakes and tarts. Each recipe includes information about the cake's preparation, baking times, difficulty level and, in an unusual and helpful addition, its staying power: from a day for many ice-cream cakes to several months for fruitcakes. But it's the inclusion of dozens of recipes for international specialty cakes that makes this mammoth collection remarkable. Bardi (The Encyclopedia of Italian Cooking) includes a number of traditional Italian recipes, such as Spiced Italian Fruitcake with Chocolate Glaze and a unique Italian Potato Cake with raisins and pine nuts. Also notable is the Thai Birthday Cake, which is made with rice, and several Peruvian desserts such as Peruvian Baba, which uses pisco, a Peruvian grape brandy. There are, however, a few flaws in the book's organization. The index is arranged only by ingredients, with no entries for titles. While this is helpful when looking for ways to use passion fruit (8 recipes), it makes finding recipes for traditional French cakes such as the Senateur or the Opera difficult for readers who don't already know their ingredients. Also, some recipes, such as Cinnamon-Apple Muffins, are not listed in the index at all. Nonetheless, the book, which contains at least one color photograph per page, is a pleasure to browse through and its photo-demonstrations of complex techniques, such as making jelly rolls, make it an excellent introduction to baking cakes, with recipes that will appeal to both beginning and advanced bakers. 500+ color photographs.
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Product Description
You'll find 1,001 delicious cake recipes-from family favorites to exotic cakes from around the world-in this mouthwatering cookbook. Step-by-step instructions make baking perfect cakes foolproof, and helpful hints and tips guide the baker to the best results. Each recipe is ranked by difficulty, from super-easy to the more challenging.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 360 pages
• Publisher: Readers Digest (October 9, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0762104031
• ISBN-13: 978-0762104031
• Product Dimensions: 11.1 x 9.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #543,038 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Just browsing through the book makes my mouth water, October 17, 2004

By	Harold McFarland (Florida) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This book is typical of the superb quality you expect from Reader's Digest publications. Excellent photography, clear instructions, all the information you want is included at the end of each recipe - number of servings, preparation time, cooking time, skill level, and number of days it will keep. All cookbooks should include this information along with the recipes. This is the way a cookbook should be done.

The book includes lots of traditional cake recipes as well as recipes you are not likely to find anywhere else without a great deal of effort. Some of the recipes include Chocolate nut strudel, banana chocolate strudel, chocolate chip-amaretto cake, double chocolate brownies, Pennsylvania Dutch Funnel Cakes, and even Baklava.

Since the entire book is about cakes, it is organized by the type of cake recipe. Those types are butter cakes, pound cakes, chocolate cakes, fresh fruit and nut cakes, dried fruit & nut cakes, sponge cakes, festive cakes, meringue cakes, strudels, charlottes, cheesecakes, no-bake cakes, tarts, small cakes & muffins, yeast cakes, special cakes, fillings & frostings.

Some people will have a problem with the small typeface of the ingredients list. Make sure you can read it before ordering the book. Other than that one small item, this is the epitome of the craft of cookbooks. Cakes: 1001 Classic Recipes from Around the World is highly recommended.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars For Experienced Bakers Only., March 21, 2006

By	jerry i h (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This book is a valuable collection of Italian cakes that you probably have never eaten, much less even heard of before. On the down side, half of the recipes in this book simply do not work as written.

If you are an experienced baker, this book is an invaluable encyclopedia of Italian cakes. Each and every recipe that you can get to work from this book will be a revelation to your dining guests, in that they are neither German, Austrian, American, nor French in influence. The combination of flavors are uniquely Italian, underappreciated in this country, and therefore valuable and sure to amaze and surprise your diners. You are on your own, however, in choosing those recipes that will work, and being able to get faulty or incomplete recipes to work correctly.

If you are an average home cook, however, avoid this book. There is no educational information, and no helpful hints. This is a big problem, in that many recipes are rather tricky and require experience to pull off correctly. Almost all recipes need additional techniques to do correctly, and these techniques are not spelled out (an experience baker, however, should be able to supply the missing bits). The recipes appear to be a simple cut and paste affair, cribbing from many sources far and wide, but without all the explanatory stuff you would normally expect to get in addition to just the recipe.

1.0 out of 5 stars New Title "Most Complicated and Frustrating Cake Book Ever!", July 7, 2009

By	Brooke Hill "nursemomofgirls" (Kansas City, MO) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Thought this would be a great cake book for spending quality time with my girls and teaching them how to bake. WRONG ANSWER!!!!! Every cake that we have made has taken an exorbitant amount of time and has not turned out the way it looks in the book, nor does it taste very good. Definately would not recommend this book for anyone that isn't a profesional chef! Really would rate this less than zero!