Rose's Heavenly Cakes »

Rose Levy Beranbaum is the award-winning author of nine cookbooks, including The Cake Bible, the International Association of Culinary Professionals Cookbook of the Year for 1988. She also won a James Beard Foundation Award in 1998 for Rose's Christmas Cookies, and her most recent book, The Bread Bible, was an IACP and James Beard Foundation nominee and was listed as one of the Top Ten Books of 2003 by Publishers Weekly and Food & Wine. She is a contributing editor to Food Arts magazine and writes regularly for the Washington Post, Fine Cooking, Reader's Digest, and Bride's. Her popular blog, realbakingwithrose.com, has created an international community of bakers where you can visit Rose Levy Beranbaum and join in the discussion on all things baking. While you are there, you can bring the author right into your kitchen as she demonstrates key techniques and shares trade secrets so that you can create perfectly divine cakes.

Rose's Heavenly Cakes

This extraordinary collection of heavenly cake recipes from "Diva of Desserts" Rose Levy Beranbaum, the award-winning author of The Cake Bible, is an essential kitchen companion for anyone who loves to bake. Illustrated throughout with stunning full-color photography, the book's meticulously tested, easy-to-follow recipes are all you need to create spectacularly beautiful cakes in your home kitchen.

In her signature crystal-clear style, Rose takes you step-by-step through the instructions for making every type of cake imaginable—more than 100 expertly tested (and re-tested) recipes in all—while full-color photographs of every finished cake and step-by-step processes offer inspiration and clear instruction. Exceptionally delicious butter and oil cakes, sponge cakes, flourless cakes, and cheesecakes, such as Heavenly Coconut Seduction Cake, Golden Lemon Almond Cake, and Devil's Food Cake with Midnight Ganache, are perfect for birthday celebrations, coffee breaks, or everyday weeknight desserts. And Rose also includes a range of charming baby cakes such as Mud Turtle Cupcakes and divine creations like the Deep Chocolate Passion Wedding Cake that will make any special occasion more festive.

With each and every recipe step thoroughly explained in Rose¿s usual approachable style, baking with Rose's Heavenly Cakes is like having a master baker right alongside you in the kitchen. In her "Ten Golden Rules of Cake Baking," Rose provides advice on the right kind of flour to select to give your cake the perfect structure, how to fill a cake pan so that your cakes bake evenly every time, the best way to unmold a cake for a perfect finished appearance, the ideal ways to store every type of cake, and much more. The baking tips and trade secrets that she shares throughout the book will show you how to transform a simple cake batter into delicious art, with perfect results every time.

From Barcelona Brownie Bars for a simple weeknight treat to White Gold Passion Genoise for a gala event, Rose's Heavenly Cakes is the cookbook that translates the chemistry of baking into the incredible, extraordinary, and unequaled joy of cake baking.

The Barnes & Noble Review

It s been 21 years since Rose Levy Beranbaum published The Cake Bible. With its meticulous instructions, measurements provided in both volume and weight, and detailed explanations of culinary chemistry, Beranbaum s Bible ratcheted up home baking from cozy Fannie Farmer and the quick and easy mix mentality to near professional levels with such extravagant eye-poppers as The Enchanted Forest -- a chocolate ganache-filled sponge roll studded with cocoa meringue sticks. Why this sequel? One may think there are only so many iterations of flour, butter, sugar, and eggs, but there ll never be a last word in baking. Bakers, like the rest of us, are always looking for the next new thing.

The recipes in Rose s Heavenly Cakes are a bit less fancy and buttercream-dependant than those in The Cake Bible, but no less tempting. There are confections with longer shelf lives, including a delicious, delicate Orange-Glow Chiffon Cake, and the spectacular Deep Chocolate Passion Wedding Cake, a multi-day project that features her new ultra-shiny chocolate lacquer glaze (made with gelatin).Several recipes are moistened with a syrup infusion after baking. These include English Gingerbread, rare for its inclusion of whole wheat flour, and an invitingly simple Lemon Poppy Seed–Sour Cream Bundt cake. Beranbaum has figured out how to keep the crumb topping crisp on her perfect Apple-Cinnamon Crumb Coffee Cake -- by letting the cake set before sprinkling it with a topping made with melted butter. Although Beranbaum has included more cakes made with oil (as opposed to just butter) and now specifies the percentage of cacao in each chocolate, she s unswayed by recent dietary trends toward whole grains or sugar substitutes such as agave nectar. In fact, one of the few things she doesn t explain in this irresistible collection is her adamant preference for bleached white flour -- but no doubt it s chemical. --Heller McAlpin

Acknowledgments.

Foreword.

Introduction.

Ten Golden Rules of Cake Baking.

Butter and Oil Cakes.

Sponge Cake.

Mostly Flourless Cakes and Cheesecakes.

Baby Cakes.

Wedding Cakes.

Ingredients.

Equipment List.

Basic Recipes.

Special Techniques.

Trouble Shooting.

Appendix.

Sources.