Product Description

Cupcakes have captivated the nation, and Clare Crespo makes them like no one else. Crespo bakes up trompe l'oeil cupcakes for every occasion, proving they can look like balls of yarn, fried eggs, or peppermint candies - and taste just as fantastic as they look. Cute, accessible, and colorful, this cookbook contains 35 wildly inventive recipes, including: Cupcake Burgers: Chocolate and yellow cupcakes sliced and frosted to look like a burger topped with lettuce and tomato on a sesame seed bun; Cubcakes: Caramel cupcakes frosted to look like a koala, panda, and grizzly bears; Pollination Cupcakes: Honey-flavored cupcakes frosted to look like flowers, topped with candy bees; Six-Pack Cupcakes: Cola-flavored cupcakes stacked and iced to look like a six-pack of soda. In her acclaimed debut title, The Secret Life Of Food, Crespo created recipes that rallied families to approach birthdays, holidays, and picnics with devilish creativity. Enthusiasm for Crespo and her food creations landed the irrespressible author on Today, Good Morning America, and a raft of cable shows, including the Food Network's Extreme Cuisine, Top 5 and Roker on the Road; HGTV's Smart Solutions; and the Style Network's You're Invited. The book also garnered high praise in publications as diverse as Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine, among others.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #54245 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 80 pages

About the Author
Clare Crespo is the author of The Secret Life Of Food. In addition to appearing frequently on television, she writes monthly columns for Elle Girl and Tokion magazines and is a regular contributor to Nick Jr., Readymade, and Family Fun. Crespo's ingenious, irreverent recipes caught the eye of Hostess, who has hired her to help create new recipes that involve classics like Twinkies and Sno Balls.

Customer Reviews

Let Your Mind Run Free!
This book is amazing and a ton of fun. I swear that my mind began racing a million miles a minute with my own decorating ideas. This book opened my mind to remembering not to just worry about technique... I have that down, but to remember to have fun and express myself. I really highly suggest this book. The recipes are easy and the book is just fun.

Disappointed
I wanted to love this book. I really, really did. I mean, c'mon - the cover is just so darn CUTE. But I must say, I was rather disappointed. First, it's somewhat misleading to say "35 recipes". There are only a few actual recipes for cupcakes. I can't remember how many off the top of my head, but I'm thinking less than 10. Then there are a few frosting recipes. And the rest of the book is basically, "Use X cupcake recipe paired with Y frosting recipe and then decorate according to my instructions." To be accurate, it should be more like, "35 creative decorating ideas to turn an ordinary cupcake into a work of art". Yes, it's cute (though I don't know if I could ever make it through a whole batch of cupcakes decorating to the degree that she does), but it's not really much of a recipe book. I agree with the others who have said you can just get your favorite cupcake recipe and look at the pictures on the cover and do your own designs without spending the extra money for the book itself.

Not your grandma's cupcakes...though you might wish they were.
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.