200 CAKES & BAKES

It is a great cook book which simple and basic to understand. The photos are simple and overall, the book is good

Best gift for baking lovers

Amazing worthy

Of all the Hamlyn 200 series of recipe books, I thought this was the most impressive. It is packed full of tempting goodies, most of which you feel would be fun to try out. There are recipes for every occasion so that there are small individual cakes, large cutting cakes, and cake and bakes which will serve very well as desserts. A particularly nice aspect of this book is that for nearly every recipe there is a variation at the end of the page so that if one of these becomes a firm favourite, there is a suggestion for doing it a little differently. Experienced cooks would have the confidence to come up with their own variations, but for the less experienced these suggestions are invaluable. As is usual with this series there is a short introduction which in this case deals with the practicalities of baking, basic equipment, preparing cake tins and basic know how. The recipes are divided into seven sections - Little Cakes, Cookies, Traybakes, Centrepiece Cakes, Cut and Come Again Cakes, Pastries and No Bake Cakes. The format is that the recipe is on one page and a tempting picture of the finished product is on the facing page. I think my only minor criticism would be that the recipes do not come with a degree of difficulty indicated. Hence one could surmise that cornflake crunchies are probably fairly simple and something which you might do with a child, whilst chocolate and chestnut roulade may be rather more demanding and have more chance of success for the experience pastry chef. However, it would have been useful if the indicated degree of difficulty had been included. Overall an impressive and practical little volume which is likely to find a permanent home in the small collection of recipe books which are used over and over again as opposed to being consigned to the library shelf.