Asian Confections, Pt. 2: Fantastic Desserts

I am in love with YesAsia. They offer so many books and other goods that I otherwise would not be able to get, or else would pay a ridiculous amount for. Even their standard shipping and expedited shipping is reasonable. ($20 for 2-5 days, which is easily half the amount many other places charge---I'm looking at YOU, Amazon Japan!)

Recently, they had a sale on some of their cookbooks, and I decided to go ahead an add this book to my order.

Fantastic Desserts, by Fiona Fong.
Everything in this book is based on fairy tale stories. You have desserts for "princesses", "witches", and even Peter Pan. True to this theme, the desserts are a bit fancier and prettier than normal....though they still maintain that lovely presentation that I adore about Asian sweets.

As a bonus, this book is both Chinese and English. Does that mean it's usable for English speakers? Well....kind of.

If you can get past the measurements used in this book, which are metric and therefore will need to be converted depending on where you live, you still have to be able to decipher the instructions. They are very brief and scant. Often they consist of: "Mix this. Mix this into the other thing. Bake for this amount. Decorate." Or they'll have odd instructions, like: "Blend the fruit until puree." Of course, I blame the translations---it's obvious they were translated very quickly, almost as an afterthought. Expect quite a few typos and "Engrish" phrases that don't quite fall on the ear correctly.

The few tips on decorating are also very sparse, which is a shame because many of the desserts are fairly common recipes that rely on the special presentation to really give them that "fantastic" kick.

Is this book impossible to use? Nope. If you are familiar with metric measurements, if you are proficient enough to figure out what's going on by a few directions and by looking at a picture of a finished dessert, you will probably be fine. If you can read Chinese, you'll probably be better off than anyone! :P

However, for the novice baker, I simply can't recommend this particular title. I am not sorry I bought it; the price was right, and if you love pictures of beautiful food, especially desserts, looking your way through this book could prove to be its own reward.

Green tea cheesecake.

Blueberry cheesecake.

Strawberry cheesecake. (They really love their cheesecake...)

Strawberry chocolate hearts.

Chocolate cake.

Banana and white chocolate mousse.

Disclaimer: The book Fantastic Desserts and all it's content and pictures are copyrighted Fiona Fong, the distributor, and any other creators. Any pictures used in this post are for the purpose of personal review only and no copyright infringement is intended.