Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #192711 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 144 pages

Customer Reviews

Great Book
I would recommend this book to anyone, especially anyone who has ever visited the real buttercup bakery. On a trip to New York I visited the bakery every day - those cupcakes are good! Although I have not yet tried to make any of the recipes, they are well explained and many are quite simple, unlike some books whose recipes always require about 50 ingredients! There is a section of colour photos of some products, and although most recipes do not have a picture, the name and little comment for each are pretty self explanatory. When buying this book, I was torn between this and the original buttercup cookbook, but this became an obvious choice when I discovered the original had no cupcake recipes! This is a well-made book full of classic American recipes, perfect for anyone with a sweet tooth!

Old-fashioned style bakery: lots of ideas but results not spectacular
I love baking and am rather obsessed with cook books - hence why I own over 80! I'm always on the look out for great books and the reason why I bought this one was because I know that the author was once a co-owner of the famous Magnolia Bakery in New York and thought that this book may contain their secret recipes..

But after reading through it and attempted several cake and cookie recipes, I must admit that I feel rather disappointed with this book. Firstly, a lot of the recipes contained within this book (and the original Buttercup Bakeshop cook book) are, or almost, IDENTICAL to the ones found in the 2 Magnolia Cook books! I mean, no wonder.. if they both came up with the winning recipes together, why wouldn't Jennifer Appel (the author) use the recipes in her books too? So if you already own Magnolia cook books, I'd say don't bother buying this one because they're almost inter-changeable.

Secondly, although there're some very interesting recipes in this book, I don't think that there're that many that I'd really like to try at home. And the ones that I have didn't really turn out that great. Don't get me wrong, the recipes DID work and the results looked good and they were all edible and ok, but it really didn't live up to my high expectation. To be honest, I don't think that their cupcakes or other yummy goodies are that amazing, I've tried other recipes from other books and they produced much more mouth-watering results.

Also, note that all the measurements are American (US cups) but you can easily convert them into metric measurements by using the charts provided at the back of the book.

In conclusion, this book will give you some good ideas and produce good (but not great!) results. The recipes are relatively easy to follow (if you stick CLOSELY to the book!) and doesn't call for many hard-to-find ingredients - although beware of the amount of sugar and butter that they ask for! It may not help you to produce the best cakes and desserts, but will surely keep you entertained if you want to bake but don't have too much time. A good addition to your cook book collection.