Cookies, Cakes and Pies Book

I'm not sure whether to give this 3 or 4 stars - I'm going with 4 since she gave me real hope that someday I can successfully make frosting, and she could be quite a funny writer at times.

Its an interesting topic, but she lacks focus. For all her talk in the beginning about how her book is arranged in layers (like a cake, get it?) the different subjects she tackles - history of cake, her family history and her personal history, both cake related and otherwise, celebrity cake makers, etc, are all mixed up like, well, like a marble cake, with no clear separations.

She talks about everything - Marie Antoinette, Martha Stewart, Victorians, colonials, Vikings, Romans, Mid-Atlantic pastry shops, snack cake history, recipes, her grandmother's kitchen, the evil wedding industry, first birthday cakes, and a lot of other things that flitted through her mind while she wrote this book on the sugar high that resulted from all the cake she taste tested while doing "research" for this book.

She talks a lot about her family experience of growing up with her grandmother's cooking, and speculates everyone's trying to find a store that sells cakes "like your grandmother's."

I find that hilarious since none of my grandmothers or step grandmothers could bake a decent cake if their lives depended on it. Still, I get the idea of trying to recreate childhood memories of the taste of that perfect birthday cake. I remember this one cake my dad made way back when the world was young that was pure Nirvana in cake form.