A New Take on Cake

A New Take on Cake: 175 Beautiful, Doable Cake Mix Recipes for Bundts, Layers, Slabs, Loaves, Cookies, and More!

by Anne Byrn
Genres: Food
Published on November 9, 2021
Pages: 384
Format: eARC Source: From author/publisher, Netgalley


The bestselling author of The Cake Mix Doctor updates her beloved approach to creating show-stopping desserts, with 50 modernized classic recipes and 150 brand-new recipes, featuring simple variations for different diets and using today's most popular flavors.

When Anne Byrn's The Cake Mix Doctor first appeared two decades ago, it amassed a cult following by delivering exactly what people wanted and needed: a shortcut for delicious and beautiful cakes that appeared to be from scratch that wouldn't take all the time they didn't have in their busy days. Since then, our lives have only gotten more frantic, and our palates have only gotten more discerning. Now Anne presents A New Take on Cake, which allows you to take just a little time and only a few ingredients to turn a mix into a masterpiece.
Inspired by the shifting landscape of the baking aisle, Anne has updated the way she bakes using not only natural cake mixes but also more olive oil instead of butter to create healthier cakes and cakes with more volume and better texture. Influenced, too, by modern flavor profiles like tahini and blood orange while staying true to the always-loved classics like chocolate and coffee, the recipes here are sure to please adventurous eaters as well as the traditionalists. With variations between simple sheet and loaf cakes, big cake projects, and decadent layer cakes, tortes, and more, even vegan and gluten-free options, these cakes are perfect for today's busy home baker.

I love this book. I love it enough that I have made several of the recipes. I love it enough that I’ve ordered by own physical copy after reading and cooking out of the Netgalley copy.

The people I work with love this book too. I like cooking things but I don’t really like to eat everything that I make. I have to force baked good onto unsuspecting people. They are very happy about this.

This book is basically a guide to fancying up cake mixes. There are so many ideas here though. There are layer cakes and cupcakes and loafs and smaller cakes and gluten free cakes and vegan cakes. There are also general guidelines like how to convert a cake recipe to cupcakes.

All the recipes that I’ve made have been amazingly moist and soft. That made wonderful cupcakes. It was a little harder when I tried a layer cake. Both of the cake layers fell apart when I tried to take them out of the pans. I had to force them into cake shapes and then majorly cover them with whipped cream and oreos. It looked like something made by an overenthusiastic toddler but it tasted amazing. My coworkers fell on it like starving hyenas. One person has already requested that cake for her birthday next May.

I will be keeping this book as a reference and I see myself baking out of it often.