[.ca] The Art of the Cake: Modern French Baking and Decorating (ISBN 0688141994)

From Amazon.com:
French cakes comprise a luscious repertoire. From the simplest pound and sponge cakes to more elaborate confections like the Délicieux (génoise layers filled with Grand Marnier-flavored buttercream and topped with a dark chocolate glaze) or the Moka (vanilla cake brushed with espresso, layered with coffee buttercream, and capped with roasted almonds), each gâteau is heaven to eat. But how to reproduce these marvels at home? Recognizing the need for a technically comprehensive yet approachable introduction to French cake making for the home baker, cooking-school owner Bruce Healy and French pastry chef Paul Bugat have created a true teaching book. The Art of the Cake will appeal to anyone interested in French cake making, but will be of particular importance to serious bakers who have, perhaps, sought just this kind of work. In the first of three parts, the book explores plain cakes, sponge and nut-meringue gâteaux, bavarians, charlottes, mousse cakes, logs, loaves, and more. Healy and Bugnat then offer more than 40 recipes for fillings, frostings, and finishes; notes on ingredients and equipment; a discussion of general techniques; and source listings. More than 400 step-by-step illustrations help readers assemble a sponge log or pipe meringues, for example, and 32 pages of color photos reveal the finished products in all their platonic glory. The authors occasionally overdilate on procedures and other matters, but in general provide just the right balance of detail and concision. Dipping into this near-encyclopedic but seductive guide, it would be difficult not to feel the call of the gâteaux and make a beeline for the kitchen. --Arthur Boehm

How to Stuff a French Cake:
Please note carefully the sub-title of this book: Modern French Baking and Decorating. French cakes have little in common with American ones. Like its predecessors on pastry and cookies, this baking book on cakes is about the types that you will find in classic, pastry shops in France, and not their American cousins. It is also aimed at the serious amateur pastry chef, not the casual home baker. If you are looking for a book to tell you how to make and decorate a chocolate birthday cake for your children, this is not the book for you. French cakes are both simple and very complicated; they are also amazing and can be heavenly like nothing else in patisserie that comes in a bewildering array of choices. Simply, a French cake is a cake base cut into layers flavored with syrup, sometimes with a flavoring agent between the layers, a filling and frosting of buttercream (but can also be flavored whipped cream, meringue, etc.), plus many decorative touches. The cake bases used are few in number and not that difficult to make. With simple variations in flavoring and decorations, the cake becomes totally different in taste and appearance. So, once you learn how to make one type of cake, you also know how to make at least a dozen other, totally different cakes. This book is a more or less complete guide for making most of the important, popular varieties of French cakes. I should also note that many of these cakes are ones that Americans will actively dislike. For example, succès brushed with flavored syrup is a French favorite, but is also a sugary, chewy, soggy thing that the average American will probably spit out with the first bite. The organization is logical and also rather sophisticated. Each chapter starts out with a thorough description of a basic technique, and all the recipes in that chapter are based on that technique. For most recipes, you will also need procedures and recipes in other parts of the book, but the author always gives the page number to go to. The chapters are also arranged from easy ones to the more sophisticated ones; it assumes that you will proceed through the book sequentially, and not skip around. The chapters are: Simple Cakes, Round Sponge Cake Gateaux, Round Nut Meringue Gateaux, Meringues, Rectangular Gateaux, Bavarians (also Charlottes and Mousse Cakes), Logs and Leaves, Filling and Frostings, Finishing Touches, Basic Preparations, and a hundred or so pages of reference information. This is definitely not your mother's cake book (unless she grew up in France). Sadly, making and decorating French cakes is difficult to do properly, and requires patience and practice. It will probably take you several tries to become successful at any one recipe. The techniques described in this book are very similar to professional ones, and, rightly speaking, are the only way you will have a chance. They have done a good job of describing these professional practices and explaining to the amateur chef how to do them. If you pay attention to what the author says and practice, you will succeed. I do have a few quibbles here and there (potato starch did not seem to improve the pound cake recipes; a flat icing spatula will not lay down an even layer of buttercream inside a cake ring; I find American cake circles to be perfectly acceptable, but have never used or seen a French one), but the information is reliable and of the highest caliber.

a real cooking school primer:
If you want to learn french cake making techniques, this book is for you. The first part teaches how to make each kind of cake (pound cake, sponge cake and flan) and then the later chapters show you how to embellish the basic cake. The recipes go from rather simple to quite complicated. I found it extremely helpful in terms of learning how to make a good meringue and different kinds of buttercreams, how to use utensils, how to frost cakes properly,how to prepares various fillings, how to make many kinds of decorations for a cake. This book is not for someone who plans to buy the book today and whip up a birthday cake for tonight. It will require study and patience but the results are very well worth it and in the process you learn a lot about the art of the cake.

Wordy, but not always to the point.:
It's a bit wordy, but not always to the point. Perhaps an experimental physicist would have written a better, more concise step-by-step instructional book than a theoretical one. Plus, some of the important basic preparations are missing. For example, recipes that call for chestnuts are redirected to a short paragraph on buying French chestnut products. It is not that difficult to make your own chestnut puree and spread, the authors could have at least offered an alternative with a few lines of instruction on how to roast, peel, candy, and puree chestnuts instead of asking you to buy a jar of French chestnuts for $20, which probably has been sitting on the store shelf for a decade. Besides, with that kind of cash, you probably can buy a chestnut tree and get 100 lbs fresh chestnuts each fall; I guess not everyone has a professor's salary to burn. The pictures of finished cakes look fine except some of the layers, fillings, and glazes are applied unevenly. Some of the topping designs are less professional, and lack the elegance and artistic looks of modern desserts. Anyway, overall, it's an ok book, but I would suggest you to get a pastry book that is written by a real professional pastry chef, such as Bo Friberg's "The Professional Pastry Chef."

The Art of Cake is great!:
This book is the most detailed cookbook that I have used. The cakes are totally delicious and edible (of course). One of my favorite cakes is the Lemon Marang Eul Log. I know all of the people who wrote and worked on this book. I have made and helped my dad make many of the delicious recipes!

Delicious De-Mystified:
This is an excellent pastry cookbook, it covers everything from theory and structure of cakes to methods and recipes of more than 100 tasty confections. The only down side it is short on pictures something I always look for in a cookbook. The Art of the Cake is authored by Bruce Healy, a former professor of theoretical physics who left teaching for his passion for French pastry, and Paul Bugat, a distinguished pastry chef and culinary artists in Paris. Their mission in part is to simplify yet explain the science behind baking cakes. But how to produce beauties like the Moka or Marquis? Healy and Bugat explain, "The only way to really understand French cakes is to break down the subject into manageable pieces. All cakes are made by putting together building blocks or components." The first part covers plain cakes, sponge and meringue, bavarians, charlottes, mousse cakes, logs, and more. They next section offers more than 40 recipes for fillings, frostings, and finishes. There are lots of notes on ingredients ( their secret for moist cakes is potato starch), and discussion on equipment (they recommend using low cost tools from hardware stores to decorate cakes, for example plasters), technique and lots of resources. More than 400 step-by-step illustrations to help readers assemble a sponge log or pipe meringues. In the culinary world, baking is often categorized as a science, but this cookbook successfully illustrates that baking is in an intriguing layered cake of science and art.