In this newest by Lee, author of the bestselling Semi-Homemade Cooking
, a typical ingredients list reads like an index of advertising sponsors—Duncan Hines, Nestle, Carnation. According to Lee, that's the idea. Why buy fresh ingredients when you can buy mixes and prepared foods that allow you to skip a few steps? The gimmick—buy name-brand food items and transform them into glorious dishes—is a good one, but the results are often less than satisfactory. (One additional downside with this approach—aside from the chemical and additives involved—is that many of these dishes emphasize attitude rather than flavor.) Recipes such as Pastel Petit Fours, which are relatively time-intensive, look much better than they taste. This is less true of the Frozen Oreo Cake, but the Easter Bunny Cake (which requires eight name-brand ingredients) is not only overly sweet, but somewhat unattractive. Of course, some of the recipes appeal to the palate by virtue of the ingredients alone. Who doesn't like whipped topping, especially if it's mixed with fruit-flavored gelatin? For the reader who tends to purchase items like the ones used herein, these recipes are sure to appeal. Perhaps unnecessarily, headshots of television stars accompany many of the recipes, something that suggests the recipes either come from or are favorites of well-known people—e.g., there's Sex and the City
's Kristin Davis's Savvy-Simple Limewhip Angel Food Cake and Katie Couric's Early Morning Raspberry Crescent Ring. (Oct.)
Forecast:
This cookbook caters to a very specific, very large niche market—so large that Miramax is backing it with a 100,000 first printing and a $250,000 marketing campaign.
