Product Description

In Sweet Celebrations the woman InStyle called "New York's reigning cake diva" shares her recipes, designs, techniques, and tips in a gloriously illustrated book.

Bon Appétit called master baker and decorator Weinstock "the Leonardo da Vinci of wedding cakes," and her stunningly original creations have graced the celebrations of Oprah Winfrey, Ted Turner, and Whitney Houston. Her repertoire includes not just grand, romantic, floral wedding cakes but cakes appropriate for all of life's festive moments. Now she shares her expertise with bakers who want the perfect cake to commemorate that very special occasion.

Sweet Celebrations includes cakes for birthdays, anniversaries, bon voyage send-offs, victory parties, and more. Graded according to difficulty, there are cakes for the beginning as well as the experienced decorator. Present your favorite graduate with a richly bound pile of books, welcome a newborn with a delectable stack of pastel-colored blocks, or serve the charming cottage cake at a housewarming. Each of the featured twenty-four cakes is shown in full color, with complete step-by-step instructions for baking, assembling, and decorating. In addition there are many inspiring photographs of the fabulous cakes Weinstock has created for clients around the world.

The book provides recipes for cakes, frostings, and fillings, as well as detailed illustrated instructions on decorating techniques. Sweet Celebrations is a must-have volume for home and professional bakers who want to make and serve cakes that taste as good as they look.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38552 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-13
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

From Amazon.com
Sylvia Weinstock designs beautiful cakes. Sharing that opinion are Oprah Winfrey, Donald Trump, and several Kennedys, among other clients of Weinstock's New York cake business. In Sweet Celebrations, Weinstock and coauthor Kate Manchester show readers how they can produce similar edible fantasies--bedecked beauties for all occasions, from weddings, birthdays, and anniversaries to bon voyages, bar mitzvahs, and baby christenings. Readers wanting to learn or refine cake-decorating skills, or those interested in this ever-evolving craft, will welcome the book.

Beginning with basic cake, filling, icing, and wash (syrupy soak) recipes, Weinstock then presents fundamental and advanced cake-designing techniques, including sugar dough work, flower and ribbon creation, and piping methods of all kinds. She then offers 24 cake projects of her own design, each illustrated in color, with detailed blueprints for their construction. Of these, readers will doubtlessly be most entranced with Weinstock's signature flower- and fruit-wreathed marvels such as her Peach Rose Wedding Cake and Marzipan Fruit Cake, but other Weinstock classics, including the Hatbox Cake, the "lace"-covered Cornelli Heart Cake, or the Clown Cake (perfect for children's parties), will prove equally tempting. Weinstock offers a level of difficulty notation for each cake so readers can choose their projects wisely and advance as their decorating skills develop. Not the least of Weinstock's success is due to her commitment to producing cakes that taste as good as they look, further cause for celebrating with her special creations. --Arthur Boehm

Review
Town & CountryExquisite, edible sculptures...unforgettable.

PepoleThe rich and famous call Sylvia Weinstock to make their sweet dreams come true.

About the Author
Sylvia Weinstock creates her edible masterpieces in a loft building in New York City, where she lives and works.

Customer Reviews

A good reference
This is a well put together book with lots of useful tips for a cake decorator.

Puny pictorials, pleasingly practical
I was so nervous about whether to invest in this book (due to some of the reviews in here)I actually took it out at the library to check it out first. I was pleasantly surprised.
It is true that the cakes featured here aren't that spectacular, so if you are looking for a coffee-table book on cake art, this isn't it. I saw only 4 or 5 cakes that stood out from the 40 examples shown. Some pictures in the book were used as filler, I guess...a few of these were nice cakes, but had no directions to go along with them.
However this book offers so much still. First and foremost, it is for American cake enthusiasts. There is no rolled fondant here; (not that there is anything wrong with fondant, but culturally, here in the states-it is not something familiar.) It is a book that can be enjoyed by cake decorators of all levels and nationalities, since many cake styles/techniques are represented. Weinstock rates each cake featured as to its level of difficulty and gives good directions on how to complete each project. You don't need any fancy cake pans or special ingredients for the most part, to make these cakes either.
I think that Weinstock probably wanted to focus on making a book that is more of a manual that anything else. The two main features of this book are the range of styles/techniques offered and the author's interest in motivating the reader to explore inventive possibilities on his/her own. The examples shown are well-known to cake novices...marzipan, cornelli lace, structured cakes, character cakes, white-on-white, basketweave, tier, gumpaste florals, and dotted swiss. The instuctions are clear and complete. Creativity is encouraged by showing one cake style and variations of that same style with additional photos.
Although there is hope that Weinstock will find time to produce yet another book with a lot more fantastic visuals-perhaps adding some autobiographical data on her business (more information than she had in this book)...I think this is a useful book to have in any cake decorator's library just for the recipes alone. As someone with a long history in culinary arts, I know these recipes are good. This is a definitive textbook on cake decorating.

Buy it!
I have been a cake designer for only a few years and have many books and recipes. The recipes and instructions in this book are amazing. The cakes are rated for difficutly and the first one I tried turned out great. She gives wonderful directions for the Italian Meringue Buttercream which can sometimes be difficult to make. All of the cake recipes I have tried are perfect. She gives a good variety of different types of cakes so that you have a lot of different examples to get ideas from. She has basic tiered cakes, including the very popular gift box type cakes. She also has round cakes, and many other sculpted cakes. There are also a lot of other pictures of cakes scattered throughout the book for inspiration. She gives great directions for making gum paste flowers and marzipan fruit. If I had to pick just one cake book to keep in my collection, this would be the one, hand down. I highly recommend this book.