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Reviews for 1000 Ideas for Decorating Cupcakes, Cakes, and Cookies

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  • Photo Collection of Decorating - Not A How-To Book2

    CakeAddict This book is essentially a catalog of pictures, an ambitious 1000 of them in fact, but I think this book should really be called '1000 Visual Inspirations for Cakes and Cookies'. It is not an instructional guide and contains almost no direct information on how to produce the results you see in each photo.

    I liken this book to a photographic telephone directory of cakes and cookies.

    If you really want to use this book to tackle the decorating part of your baked goods then you will either have to be a seasoned decorator who can just work from a single picture or you must love the 'homework' of logging onto the Internet to research the How-To part.

    I believe you could quite easily put together your own version of '1000 Ideas' and, in all likelihood, gather more than 1000 ideas if you sat down to some serious online browsing. However, if you want it all pre-selected for you, colour-printed and bound together professionally then you just might want this book for your collection. I'm not sure I did.

    The problem for me with this book was that it left me wanting for something more practical. There are a small handful of recipes for basic frostings and a ganache but cake designs are left to guesswork.

    I was quite disappointed too, that for a book that prides itself of being a photo-based inspirational tome, many of the photos in the book looked quite amateurish. Many of the cakes and cookies were pretty enough and very well-made but photo quality was inconsistent throughout the book. There were just too many contributors with a very wide range of photography skills. Frankly speaking, while some shots were great, a significant amount were also out-of-focus or lighting was poor resulting in less than professional results.

    I understand that many contributors are not professional photographers but I think it was up to the authors/ editors to select the best photos (inspiration and photo quality both!) to suit the medium of book publishing.

    Many photos that are suitable for web publishing would not have been suitable for book printing due to resolution issues. More consideration should have been taken regarding this issue when selecting the photos for this publication.

    The upside is that it has a pretty cover and all the photos are in full-colour but even then this leaves you wishing it was a hardcover so that it would make a better coffee table book.

    If you're already adept at decorating then I suppose you might get some good ideas from this collection of pictures for your own projects. If you're a beginner, however, you'll definitely need more than a few how-to lessons before you might enjoy this book for what it is. This is a photo book of cake and cookie inspirations, a few frosting recipes, and contains mentions to a few professional and home bakers internationally.

    Generally, I prefer my decorating books to contain more recipes, more instructions and would gladly take a volume with less photos in favour of more guidance. by CakeAddict

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