Cakes: 1001 Classic Recipes: 1001 Authentic Recipes

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.