Review: Quite different from American cakes
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 5, 2012
As I plan to review four of Ms. Romsey's cookbooks, I think it best to cover the major issue I have with all of them right at the beginning: Measurements and ingredient names.  For the British marketplace, it's not a problem.  British cooks will understand things like cornflour and caster sugar; Americans will have to look them up. Volumes can be a problem. British cooks will know that the pints of liquid referred to are Imperial pints.  Americans will have to do some stepping to come up with the equivalent measurements for some ingredients.  (For the record, an Imperial pint is roughly 20 liquid oz. Thus 1/4 of a pint will be about 5 oz in the UK, not 4 as it is here in the US.) Ingredients listed by weight are simpler, and any cook who routinely uses a scale for baking will have no problems with these.  However I think that it would have been an enormous help to all cooks if the measurements had been converted to metric.The other issue I have, and I don't think this is necessarily a problem with Ms. Romsey's formatting, is that pages will sometimes repeat on my Kindle.  I'll go through the first page of a recipe, turn the page and find most of the information repeated on the next page.  I don't know what causes this issue, but be aware of it as you work. It can be confusing if you're in the middle of a recipe.One of the first things I noticed here was that these are more what Americans refer to as "tea cakes," "buns," and "sweet rolls." They're unfrosted (In my opinion, not a bad thing; American frostings are often much too sweet.) or overlaid with sheets of marzipan, or simply layered with jam or custard, or whipped cream.  They're homier cakes than the standard American two-layer frosted cake; less dessert than a little something with coffee or tea.I was pleased to discover the true nature of Eccles cakes and Parkin, cakes I'd only ever read about in novels or history books.  I was also happy to have a recipe for a traditional British Christmas cake, though it's very much what American's refer to as "fruitcake" though with rather less of the icky candied fruit which makes fruitcake so inedible.  It's a time-consuming recipe, but looks like it might be worth that time.The others look... well, friendly.  The sort of cakes you have on hand for visitors.  This cookbook makes a very nice change from the over-fancy and often unpalatably sweet cakes Americans seem obsessed with.  I'm looking forward to making quite a few of the recipes in this book.