What's New, Cupcake? Ingeniously Simple Designs For Every Occasion (2010) - Plot & Excerpts
The book What’s New Cupcake, sequel to Hello Cupcake, is an instructional cookbook on how to decorate cupcakes. With recipes and food styling by Karen Tack and photography by Alan Richardson, What’s New, Cupcake provides simple to follow directions for any situation and is loads of fun to read.Each set of directions starts off with ingredients and what other materials needed to decorate. There is a picture of the final product that is helpful to compare your work in progress to. Within your cupcake design, there may be parts that require explanation. The book provides easy to follow step by step photos of the creation as well as written directions.What’s New, Cupcake is the ultimate cookbook because it has such a variety of themes and designs for anything you can think of. The book is divided into seven different sections including “You Say It’s Your Birthday?” and “Hooray for Holidays”.The first 21 pages are specifically dedicated to different techniques and materials you can use and choose from. My favorite technique is the flower section where Tack does an amazing job of selecting different choices of sweets to create your ideal candy flower.Have you ever watched a show like “Cupcake Wars” and wondered how the bakers always manage to get the perfect frosted swirl on top of their cupcakes? With Richardson’s amazing photography, it’s simple to learn and easy to do! “For a peak, use the tip of an offset spatula to swirl and lift the frosting,” Tack directs to top of the cupcake.The back of the book contains a reference section and unlike other cookbooks I’ve read, it taught you how to make different cake flavors out of box cake mixes and how to make almost-homemade frostings. This is surprisingly helpful for favors that aren’t exactly available through store bought Betty Crocker mixes. Karen Tack says “Like most folks, we’re busy, and we definitely don’t want to lose precious cupcaking time,” and this whole section is the ideal solution for time constraints.Like I’ve previously mentioned, Alan Richardson and Karen Tack are the dynamic duo that make What’s New, Cupcake so fantastic! Richardson’s photography makes the book feel bubbly and exciting while using the perfect angles and settings to capture Tack’s amazing designs.Unlike many decorating books I’ve seen where the designs seem complicated and less than user friendly, What’s New, Cupcake made all the designs look anything but difficult and inspired me to try my hand at decorating, so I did! I chose “Chinese Takeout” for my first batch and using a combination of thinly piped frosting for noodles, green laffy taffy for broccoli and pink for pork slivers, I was able to create a surprisingly realistic representation of lo mein!I also decided to make “Busy Bees” for my second batch and was again surprised at how close mine turned out in comparison to the photos in the book! Using a sugar cookie, yellow sprinkles and honey, I created honeycombs and with a black jelly bean, sliced almonds and yellow frosting I made a small honey bee to top off my design.I thoroughly enjoyed What’s New, Cupcake and after trying out a few of the techniques, I am convinced that this is a truly amazing cookbook. It will inspire even the most untalented bakers to whip up some silly monster cupcakes! I highly recommend checking out this book and all the cupcake creations inside. Great new ideas for cupcakes. I especially love the haunted house and the OH Tannenbaum cupcake creations. I got so many compliments when I bring them to parties. There is also a great April fools section that I need to try out sometime. This book is written for the new to cake and cupcake decorating with lots of shortcuts like box cakes and store bought frosting. The authors make it easy to follow the directions. There are also no hard to find ingredients. They use things like M&M and twinkies covered in chocolate to decorate. For the more practiced cake decorator, I highly recommend you use the ideas and patterns from the book but make your cupcakes and frosting from scratch. I highly recommend the book.
What do You think about What's New, Cupcake? Ingeniously Simple Designs For Every Occasion (2010)?
There are a lot of cute ideas in this book. They are broken down so it makes it simple to make them.
—binko
This was seriously the best cooking book I ever read it was the best!!!!! I'm totally inspired!
—Helen
Decorating tips are fun, but the recipes are not up to par.
—fabibliophile
really cute, fun ideas. made a few with a awsome friend.
—kikoandthebooks
some of the techniques were easy and useful
—Kennedy
