Review: Nice Photos, but Jumbled Recipes
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 02 26, 2013
Looking through the titles of the recipes and photographs of the cakes in this book is enough to get your mouth watering and start you looking for your mixing bowl.But before you get too carried away, it's important to note that the recipes seem to be based on many ingredients that are difficult to impossible to find if you live in the US. Examples are items such as "vanilla sugar flour," wheat flour type 400 or 550," "cream fixer," and "chocolate cream parfait flour."Other concerns are with many of the measurements used in the recipes. There are notes about metric conversions and a link to a conversion site, but the problems go beyond mere conversions. The recipes mostly give cups or tablespoons as measurements, but in awkward amounts such as 2.3 cups of sugar, .8 cups of milk, or 1/5 cup of water as well as mixing metric amounts for some ingredients with other amounts given in cups within a recipe. Other recipe quatities are given as "sachets" or "bags" with no clue as to how much these items contain.The oven temperatures are given in Celsius and the pan sizes are in centimeters.I also question the quantities of ingredients required for in several recipes. For example, the "Delicious Rich Chocolate Cake" called for an amazing 20 cups of cream for the filling and the "Easy Chocolate Cake" calls for 24 eggs! Other examples are the "Chocolate Party Cake" calling for 20 cups of milk and the "Blueberry and Mint Chocolate Cake" requiring 20 1/2 cups of blueberry jam. Really? If these amounts are correct, these cakes would cost a small fortune to make. If they are typos, that introduces other questions about the validity of all of the recipes in this book.Not recommended, especially not for bakers in the US.