Product Description

What's short and sweet and cute as a button? Cupcakes! And everyone loves 'em! Trusted favorites at picnics, potlucks, and bake sales, cupcakes go equally well at relaxed and informal gatherings or at elegant parties. Here are 50 scrumptious ways to bring smiles and those nostalgic memories back faster than a kid can lick the batter off a beater. Try a Cinnamon Sugar Puff Cupcake—they go from mixing bowl to oven to one happy taker in less than an hour. Who needs a peanut butter cup when there's a peanut butter cupcake in the house? Ethereal Lemon Angel Cupcakes soar even higher when served with some fresh seasonal fruit. With tips and techniques for perfect cupcake-making, basic "head-start" recipes, and gorgeous photographs, it's time to get out the baking pans and join the cupcake craze. These diminutive cakes may be small but they stand tall in the world of sweets.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #72518 in Books
• Brand: Chronicle Books
• Published on: 2005-04-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780811845458
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Lush, larger-than-life photographs are just the icing on the cupcake that is this delightful contribution to the canon of confectionary cookbooks. Klivans' recipes range from cute Lemon Poppy Seed Butterfly Cupcakes to clever Chocolate-Covered Brownie Ice Cream Cone Cupcakes, which are baked in an ice-cream cone. When tested, the bakery-worthy Sticky Fig Cupcakes with Brown Sugar Glaze looked just like the photograph and the flavor was excellent; fragrant lemon zest, crunchy fig seeds and the sticky syrup glaze (from the result of an unusually slow baking technique) reveal a carefully developed recipe. Unlike several other cupcake books, Klivans' recipes are easy to follow and produce excellent results. Succinct and useful, the first chapter covers the basics: supplies, ingredients and mixing techniques. Other little details, like chapter introductions designed to look like cupcakes, the pastel Fifties color scheme and the use of vintage fabrics in the photographs, make the book a pleasure to browse.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
Lush, larger-than-life photographs are just the icing on the cupcake that is this delightful contribution to the canon of confectionary cookbooks. Klivans' recipes range from cute Lemon Poppy Seed Butterfly Cupcakes to clever Chocolate-Covered Brownie Ice Cream Cone Cupcakes, which are baked in an ice-cream cone. When tested, the bakery-worthy Sticky Fig Cupcakes with Brown Sugar Glaze looked just like the photograph and the flavor was excellent; fragrant lemon zest, crunchy fig seeds and the sticky syrup glaze (from the result of an unusually slow baking technique) reveal a carefully developed recipe. Unlike several other cupcake books, Klivans' recipes are easy to follow and produce excellent results. Succinct and useful, the first chapter covers the basics: supplies, ingredients and mixing techniques. Other little details, like chapter introductions designed to look like cupcakes, the pastel Fifties color scheme and the use of vintage fabrics in the photographs, make the book a pleasure to browse. -Publishers Weekly

About the Author
Elinor Klivans is a notable food writer, publishing articles for Bon Appétit, Eating Well, Fine Cooking, and the Washington Post, among others. She is the author of several cookbooks, including Big Fat Cookies. She lives in Camden, Maine.France Ruffenach's photographs have appeared in Everything Tastes Better with Garlic (0-8118-3816-1) and Christmas Family Gatherings (0-8118-4018-2). A native of Paris, she now lives in San Francisco.

Customer Reviews

Could have been great.
Someone (author? editor? photographer? all three?) isn't clear on the concept that this is a COOKBOOK. Granted, due to budgetary restraints, some cookbooks can't photograph every recipe. Problem is, that this one could have. We have full-page artistic illustrations of mixing bowls, piping tubes, beaters, 2 pages of empty cupcake pans, and 3 full pages showing paper cupcake liners. We have one page showing three (unidentified) cupcakes with two of them out of focus. If all those full pages that were dedicated to artistic fulfillment and depth of field exercises, had instead each shown 2 or 3 cupcakes each, every recipe in the book could have been presented. Captioning would have been nice, too. One cannot assume that everyone knows what a "vanilla cheesecake crunch top cupcake" looks like, but I think that it should be safe to assume that everybody knows what a paper cupcake liner looks like!

Pictures pictures - we want the pictures!
So many cookbooks are photo-oriented, only to make the book better looking. You see props and garnishes that are never mentioned or described, leaving you to wonder "if that flower is a sugar-coated pansy or porcelain" or "Was that cake stand vintage?"... that sort of thing. Well, this book is textually detailed down to the last dot so the lack of a photo for each recipe is a sad omission. You will want to make the cupcakes, sure, but only the ones with pictures because you have no clue how the other ones should look. If one is going to describe how to roll gumdrops out and curl them into tiny flowers, show a picture please. What's there looks gorgeous in this book but what is missing is missing in the biggest way.

Nice pictures shame about basic recipe
I actually like the pictures in this book and find it a nice book to read but I have found, as other people have, that the basic cupcake recipe for Chocolate Sour Cream Cupcakes does NOT work. I have tried it three times and (once totally ignoring the book method and using a method from another tried and tested book) found that each time the cupcakes sink and form huge craters that leave the cakes unedible. I am an avid cookbook collector and cook and have never found this problem before. Such a shame as the book looks so nice.