Party Animal Cakes: 15 Fantastic Designs (ISBN 0715322079)

Parents will appreciate the kid-friendly animal themes:
The eye-catching animal cakes featured on the cover and back of PARTY ANIMAL CAKES may look difficult to make, but with Lindy Smith's step-by-step, color photo enhanced directions in hand, it's a piece of cake to produce them. A base cake round, fondant, and icing along with a cutting template are usually all that's needed, and sidebars of materials and equipment lists assure cooks have everything they need right at hand. These aren't quick productions nor are they for baking beginners, but cooks with some experience will find this takes them the next step from average to extraordinary cake-making. Parents will appreciate the kid-friendly animal themes. Diane C. Donovan California Bookwatch

I wish there was a:
I wish there was a bit more detail in the step-by-step instructions, perhaps more illustrations, but ultimately this is an awesome book that is a life saver when trying to come up with ideas for cakes and parties.

Careful with the recipe:
The pictures are gorgeous and the instructions seem detailed. However, all of the cakes are based on just two recipes. I tried the Madeira cake and I wished I had tested it before I bought all my supplies. (I am too embarrassed to admit how much I spent on those!). I knew something was the matter by the batter consistency. It was very thick. It thought it was strange that the cake recipe didn't call for any liquid, just eggs. Also, the cake recipe didn't ask for any baking powder or baking soda. Just half the flour was supposed to be "self-rising". Now, granted "zelfrijzend" flour in the Netherlands is what I had to use instead of the self rising flour that the author used. It maybe doesn't have enough rising agent in it to work as the author used. Suffice to say the cake that resulted was as hard as a brick, and about 1/2 as high as it needed to be for the animal I planned to make. Be careful with the cake recipes in this book.

Party Animal - great book:
This is a great book. Some of the measurements are hard to follow since they are metric and I can't find some of the tools they use, but it's very detailed and easy to follow.

Fondant is a difficult art:
This book has very beautiful pictures of cakes as well as very detailed directions and recipes. However, all but 1 of the cakes in the book are decorated with fondant, which really is an art and takes a LOT of time and practice. Fondant also isn't very tasty - it's really more for looks than taste. I did manage to produce a monkey cake and a chinchilla cake, which both looked like a child's creation compared to those illustrated in the book (even though they took a few hours each to make). But they were cute - and since fondant is very smooth and glossy, the cakes looked unique. So this book is good if you know that you want to make fondant cake. Otherwise, if you just want to make some cute and EASY cakes, consider a different book.