Review: Great recipes but difficult to use cookbook!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 12 12, 2012
This cookbook is full of amazing recipes, most all of them with beautiful photos. I have bookmarked so many that I want to try, that I don't even know where to start.I would give this cookbook 10 stars IF ~ it had a working TOC - come on, the book is an estimated 1,000 pages! You have to flip through every page to find the recipe you want. There are a few random links in the TOC but most of the ones I clicked took me to random pages/photos that had nothing to do with the item I clicked. The author makes some statement about Amazon frowning on authors including indexes in their ebooks and uses that as an excuse for not having one. Really? What about working TOCs? I don't think the problem is that Amazon frowns on it - I think the author either doesn't know how to program a working TOC or is just too lazy to do it?There are a lot of recipes for instance that call for using the 'standard tart crust recipe' or 'standard pie crust recipe' - but the crust recipe doesn't follow the recipe you're viewing and you're given no clues as to where in the book you can find it. So, even if you're bookmarking recipes there is no way to tie together the filling recipe with the crust other than to go through all of your bookmarks one by one to find it.I also don't understand the photos for the recipes appear after the recipe instead of before it or in the beginning after the description. Its kinda confusing having them placed that way. You have to flip through 1-3 pages of the recipe and instructions to get to the photo, my preference is to see how the finished product will look upfront, but that may just be a personnal preference and not bother anyone else?I'm with another reviewer in that I'd love to have a printed copy of this cookbook. The way it is formatted it would work better as a paper version where you could easily flip back and forth. Although, even then the author would need to give more information as to how to find the corresponding crust, filling, frosting recipes to go along with the pies, cakes etc that they correspond to, to make it easier to use.All in all I do recommend the book for content. But, if the lack of a way to navigate easily bothers you, you may want to look for a different cookbook.