Nothing, and I mean nothing, makes me disregard a cookbook review faster than seeing, "I haven't tried any of the recipes yet, but the book is beautifully laid out and...."
Close window.
No. No. No. There are hundreds and hundreds of cookbooks on the market. And probably hundreds of books solely focused on cupcakes. It's easy to hide under a pretty presentation. If the recipes are failures, the book is useless. If you haven't even tried the recipes, you haven't given a fair assessment of the book and in my opinion, can't offer a really useful review.*
Rest assured that I have tried many of the recipes in the book I am about to review. :)
The Big Book of Cupcakes, by Jan Moon.
Jan Moon is the owner of Dreamcakes Bakery. Her interest in baking and cooking started when she was young, and when she was old enough she got a job at Southern Living magazine, working in the Test Kitchen. Her bakery is truly a labor of love. To Jan, we eat with our eyes too, so everything she puts out at her bakery is beautiful as well as tasty.
Like pretty much all baking books, the first chapters cover things like basic tools and techniques needed to start your cupcake making adventures.
Included are a couple ways to ice the cupcakes in an attractive fashion, as well as tips on how to add yummy filling to the centers.
The cupcakes are divided up into themes: Spring Fever, Summer Celebrations, Fall Follies, Winter Wonders, and Cupcakes for Sharing.
Each and every recipe offers a beautiful, full-page photo of the finished product. This greatly pleases me, as I am very visual and like knowing exactly how something should look.
The recipes are truly amazing. Sometimes, it feels as though when bakery owners put out a book, they just want to generate buzz, and not actually part with their beloved recipes. Jan Moon is quite generous, however. The cupcakes I have made and brought to work are so good that several of my co-workers have told me I need to submit to a magazine. One girl, upon tasting the banana cupcake with peanut butter frosting, exclaimed that it was the best thing she had ever eaten, and promptly requested the recipe to use at her wedding! (Though she intended to swap out the banana for chocolate)
I've enjoyed making cupcakes from this book so much that I was finally inspired to buy my own icing tubes and decorating tips. :)
There are a couple of things I do need to point out, however.
1. The recipes all call for Lily White flour, which is a soft-wheat flour only available in Southern states. If you want to order a bag online, be prepared to pay $10 or so. However, this is not really necessary. Why? Because if you read the description of Lily White in the book, Jan Moon specifically says it is very similar to cake flour. Not wanting to pay that much for flour unless I needed to, I decided to go with it, and bought a box of Swan's Down cake flour. My cupcakes have turned out perfectly.
So please, do not let the fact it calls for soft-wheat flour put you off! You CAN substitute it with cake flour, with fantastic results.
2. The cupcakes usually call for baking times of 12-15 minutes, but I found that I generally had to bake them for at least 20 minutes. I blame my oven's heat and do not think it is the book's fault. I recommend using the lowest suggested number of minutes first and adding more time as needed. Burned cupcakes make no one happy.
3. If a recipe uses the same cake base as one in an earlier part of the book, rather than re-printing the recipe, it refers you to the earlier page. This means you might have to flip back and forth between pages. To me, this isn't a huge deal; I like taking pictures of the recipes I'll need with my phone, then I can view them that way and save some hassle.
4. Watch the powdered sugar! This was the one real flaw I've found so far. In a cream cheese recipe I was making, it called for a whopping TWO 16-oz packages of powdered sugar.
Warning bells went off in my head, but I figured that the author probably knew something I didn't....she is the one with her own bakery, after all.
I added most of the first packaged of sugar and tasted it. BLECH! Way too sweet, and because there was so much sugar it had a grainy texture, instead of the beautiful smooth texture cream cheese frosting usually has. There was no way I was going to add a second package to this; it would have been inedible.
In fact, the use of even one whole package of powdered sugar seems a lot for most of these recipes. I remade the cream cheese frosting using the suggested four cups of sugar from another frosting recipe in the book, and it came out perfectly. The best advice I can give is to gradually add the sugar per your own personal tastes and go from there. I'm hoping it was an editing error that will be corrected in future publishing.
If I learned anything from that, it was to trust my instincts!
Despite that flaw, the book, and the results I have gotten from the book, have been delicious, lovely, and just plain fun to make. With so many cupcake books on the market due to the recent craze, it's hard to know which offer trustworthy recipes and which only offer pretty pictures. I'm happy to say that Jan Moon's beautiful book offers both. Pick up a copy at Amazon if you're ready to dive into the world of cupcakes, or if you just want fresh inspiration.
Disclaimer: The book Big Book of Cupcakes, its content and photos, are copyrighted Jan Moon, Southern Living, and any other respective creators. Any pictures used here are solely for the purpose of personal review and no copyright infringement is intended.
*I am aware that I haven't yet tried any recipes from Pie It Forward; that will change now that the weather is warmer and we have fresh fruit. If I find the recipes to be successful, or lacking, I will post an updated review detailing my opinions.
It's like those reviews for games where they only played half of the game. Illogical.
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