[.ca] The Cake Mix Doctor (ISBN 0761117903)

From Amazon.com:
Cake mixes are undoubtedly convenient, but do they produce good cakes? They can, says Anne Byrn, author of The Cake Mix Doctor, if you know how to tweak them. Doing this involves the addition of ingredients to enrich the mixes and flavorings to enhance and, in some cases, conceal questionable tastes. To prove her point, Byrn offers more than 175 recipes for mix-based cakes and other desserts, including formulas for frostings that, Byrn maintains, must be made from scratch. The results are convincing; readers interested in satisfying, dependable desserts prepared quickly and with little fuss should welcome the book. Beginning with a useful discussion of cake mixes, their history and composition, and an outline of the mix-transformation battle plan, the book then presents the recipes in chapters such as "Chocolate Cakes," "Cake-Mix Classics," "Special Occasion Cakes," and "Incredible Bars and Comforting Cookies." Among the most successful offerings are Deeply Chocolate Almond Cake with Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting, Banana Cake with Quick Caramel Frosting, and Lemon Buttermilk Poppy Seed Cake. A chapter devoted to crumbles, crisps, cobblers, trifles, and even a dessert pizza shows how to use the mixes in innovative ways, and "Lighter Cakes" presents "healthier" offerings, such as Pear and Toasted Pecan Buttermilk Cake. With sidebars such as The Legendary Pillsbury Bake-Off and tips for success throughout ("Cinnamon is one of the great tools to use when doctoring up cake mixes," begins one), the book explores every aspect of cake-mix fixing while revealing the unexpected richness that the process can yield. --Arthur Boehm

This Book is a Treasure!:
I purchased this book three weeks ago, and have been in the kitchen, churning out Ann Bryn recipes, ever since. I have spent years curling a lip at cake mixes, sifting, incorporating dry ingredients,and spending long periods of time baking cakes from scratch. These cakes are every bit as good as cakes made from scratch (and some are better). My husband swooned over the Double Chocolate Rum Cake, my friends said that the Applesauce Spice Cake with Caramel Glaze was the best that they had eaten, my team loved the Buttermilk Devil's Food Cake with White Choclate Frosting.....I could go on and on. But, I won't. :-) Instead, I'm going to get busy and order all of the rest of her cookbooks.

Do yourself a favor and buy this book:
This book has made me a cake lover. Every cake comes out perfect and yet the best part is that every recipe starts with a boxed mix. However, you would never guess as each cake is decadent. The pictures of each cake listed in the front of the book is a bit cheasy but can be really fun if you let friends pick which cake they want for thier birthday based on the pictures. This book rocks.

Dessert Lover's Dream Come True!:
I love this cookbook! It is full of easy recipes that take just minutes to prepare; and require ingredients I almost always already have in my pantry. Anne Byrn also made it interesting reading by filling the book with facts about the recipes and the cake mix industry. I have tried many of the recipes and so far have only found one "bad" recipe...don't use her Cream Cheese Frosting recipe, it is more like a sauce than a frosting.

Awesome!:
This is an excellent cookbook! Any recipe I have made- cakes, frostings, bars, comes out wonderful. They always get rave reviews! It also has great tips on all aspects of cake baking. I am so glad I have this cookbook, and I use it all the time.

A little help for the semi-baker...:
Usually I'm a great proponent of doing things from scratch, but there are some good reasons why people might want to use Byrn's recipes that turn cake mixes into... well, cakes, but not quite the cakes you'd get if you just followed the directions on the box. Byrn makes a good case for the benefits of cake mixes. For example, they're made to be very mistake-tolerant. You can mix them too long or not enough, have an oven that's a bit off temperature-wise, or muck up the amount of liquid, and as long as you haven't gone *too* far off you'll still end up with an edible product. More often, anyway, than if you were starting from scratch. Also, while many from-scratch cakes are actually quite simple and easy, some cooks simply feel daunted by them. Starting with cake mixes can feel less like making a real commitment to something. And in some cases, the cake mix version really is easier or quicker or cheaper. Of course I mentioned that these cakes don't come out tasting like cake mix cakes. Ann makes sure to add things to her cake mixes that you won't find on the box. One of these ingredients is usually butter--lots of butter--so these aren't diet recipes. She also adds a dash of something flavorful. Then she combines her cakes with other things, such as the wonderful icing and frosting recipes she includes. There are only a couple of things that keep me from giving this cookbook 5 stars. One is that really, most cake mix cakes aren't that much simpler than starting from scratch--this cookbook is great if you aren't a very good cook and your cakes tend to mysteriously fail, but not so amazing if you know what you're doing. The other is a structural problem. Some of the recipes had odd little structural issues that I've never had with "normal" recipes, like a grainy icing or a "chocolate syrup cake" (syrup baked into the middle of a ring-shaped cake) that simply fell into pieces when we attempted to remove it from the pan. There are handy tips and hints for working with cake mixes and cakes. There's a huge variety of recipes for almost every cake imaginable. The front of the book includes tiny color photos of (I think) all of the recipes. The recipes are uniformly delicious, but they do sometimes have other issues. Buy the cookbook if you need a little help when baking, and make sure to try a recipe ahead of time before making it for company.