Review: Poorly organized and laid out
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 12 16, 2012
I have a collection of dozens of cookbooks, written by many different cooks/chefs.  But I've never seen one as poorly written as this one.  Who writes a cookbook without lists of ingredients?  This author!  Instead of starting the recipe with a list of all ingredients needed, followed by the instructions, this "author" writes the whole book in paragraph form.The following is an excerpt from one of the "recipes."Step 1: Make the cake. As always, start by preheating your oven. For this recipe, set your dial to 325F. (I almost never remember to do this first and almost always end up with a raw cake just waiting for the oven to be warm enough.)And, while we're prepping, let's take care of a few other things that I always forget. Get out 1 stick of butter and start to let it soften. Get out 1 large egg so that it is close to room temperature when we are ready for it.What makes this recipe one of my favorites is that it is so easy. No need to separately mix wet ingredients and dry ingredients, as we find with so many cake recipes.Start with your stick of softened (not melted) unsalted butter in your bowl and cream it until it's smooth. This is one of my least favorite parts because the mixer will bump quite a bit at first but stick with it and within minutes the butter should smooth out nicely.Add  cup of granulated and 1 cup of light brown sugar and beat for about 3 minutes. (At this point my daughter usually entertains herself by trying to eat the brown sugar; ahh kids and sugar). This, on the other hand, is my favorite part of baking a cake. Watching that sugar and butter turn into a fluffy concoction is heavenly.Once your sugar and butter is delightfully fluffy, add 1 large egg (hopefully not still chilled at this point) and beat well. Then add the last of your wet ingredients: 1 cup of buttermilk and 1 tsp of vanilla extract. I've ruined several cakes by not paying attention to the buttermilk so be sure to read the directions on the can if you are using the powdered version. Buttermilk can be finicky and can really mess up a cake.Now, let's bring in our dry ingredients. One-by-one add in 1  cups of flour,  cup of cocoa,  tsp of baking soda,  tsp baking powder, and  tsp of salt. Use a spoon, not your mixer if you can avoid it to mix them together until the whole batter is well blended. The mixture shouldn't be too tough to manage by hand but your arm muscles might get a work out! Be careful to not over mix as this will make the cake tough and, therefore, tougher to work with when we get to the pop making. Just make sure that the flour is all blended in and you should be fine."By the way - Step 2 consists of the instructions for making the icing.  Instead of reading a well-prepared recipe, it was more like being on the receiving end of a long-winded, chatty phone call with a 12-year-old telling me how she made her first cake.This book isn't worth the space it takes on my Kindle.  Even though it's free, I'm returning it.