Cake Decorating Basics: Techniques and Tips for Creating Beautiful Cakes

This book is excellent. I am an experienced baker and I bought it for a friend who wants to learn how to bake specialty cakes. It has a little bit of everything. Good to start. Excellent seller who kept in touch with me all the time until I got my book. Thanks!

I was looking for basic decorating instructions and disappointed with content. I don’t need cake recipes but a good royal icing recipe would have been great. If your looking for fondant techniques this might work. Not what I was looking for. Disappointing purchase.

It was helpful for a few things I didn't already know (hence basics). I love the ending fondant molding section. She shows you basic animals/figurines (dog, duck, man.. Etc) which open doors to several other cute ideas. Lots of pictures and some cute tricks that I will be trying soon. Overall a useful book.

The book was informative to some extent, but I expected a more every day baker kind of step by step product. This to me was leaning more toward a professional cake decorating style using supplies and items I've never heard of and wouldn't know where to find.

Whoa, this book tells you to line irregular shaped pans with plastic wrap and bake the cake with the plastic wrap in the pan. That's not a good idea. There are also several decorative techniques shown, but the book doesn't provide photos of finished cakes with the various techniques. Putting decorating techniques in context is always helpful to give a good feel for how the technique really looks, especially to novice cake decorators - which this book is aimed at.One good thing about the book is that it provides recipes for certain food issues - gluten-free, egg-free, dairy-free and diabetic-friendly. The recipes are for a fruit cake and a sponge cake.

Absolutely awful! It says to line pans with plastic wrap and wax paper. It only gives two cake recipes: fruit cake and “sponge” cake made with self rising flour as the only leavening agent. It also claims that both fruit and sponge cake must be covered in fondant or marzipan. Gives no tips on decorating with buttercream. Total rubbish, glad I borrowed from a library instead of purchase.

I'm not sure what some people expect from a book entitled "Cake Decorating BASICS"? This book does pretty much what it says in the title.If you want to learn about decorating, lining tins, equipment required, different types of paste, icing cakes etc, in other words - the basics - then this is the book for you!I'm not sure quite what the negative reviewers were expecting from a book with this title. It's well illustrated, and each diagram explained. It covers piping techniques and yes, it covers sugarpaste modelling extensively. I can't quite understand why that's a bad thing? It's even got recipes for diabetics and allergy sufferers, which is unexpected for a basic book.As far as I can see, the only thing it doesn't do is cover sugarcraft flowers, but that is a very specific topic and many would argue not for beginners, and hence not for this book. Though it does have some simple tiered wedding cakes, and explains how to use pillars and dowels.The only thing I would agree with is that the sponge cake recipes are on the large side, though it really depends on what tin you're using. Cake tins vary from 2" deep through to 4" deep professional tins, the recipes are for the latter. If you have basic smaller tins then you could probably get away with downsizing by one i.e. make the 8" quantities for a 9" tin and so on. However, I didn't buy this book for cake recipes, rather to learn cake decorating and this book does that well.It may be of interest to you or not, to know that I also bought Alan Dunn's book  The Wedding Cake Decorator's Bible: A Resource of Mix-and-Match-Designs and Embellishments , which, despite the title is a very good book for beginners who want to learn sugarcraft. I feel that these two books together pretty much cover everything a beginner like me could want.If you're just starting out and you're planning on making more conventional cakes, like birthdays, christmas, easter you have everything you need in this book. Your children will love their birthday cakes, and your friends and family will be impressed!Though expect some added work from the orders coming your way... The Wedding Cake Decorator's Bible: A Resource of Mix-and-Match-Designs and Embellishments

Very easy to follow and some great tips

I bought this book having borrowed a copy from a friend, so I knew there was lots of useful stuff for getting started and I was particularly keen to get the recipe guides for different types and sizes of cake, including gluten free etc. However, I had the same experience as other reviewers with the quantities and cooking time/temperatures. I made one 8inch round (chocolate) sponge cake and one 6 inch round. The recipes gave beautiful mixtures but, even with the deep tins I used, there was too much. If I hadn't lined them thoroughly above the height of the tin, the cakes would have risen out of the tin and fallen flat. The cooking times were also way off - makes me wonder if there was a typo but it was consistently wrong across the board. At the temperature given (120 C - and I used that in a fan oven) both my cakes took about 2 hours to cook through properly. Makes me wonder if I should have been dividing the mixture between 2 tins. Since a basic guide is presumably aimed at beginners, this was less than helpful.

well pleased with purchase

Great book, thanks a lot!