Comments: This is an excellent book. It covers all the bases of cake decorating. It has a couple dozen basic (delicious) recipes for cake and frosting, with suggestions for mixing and matching them to make a huge variety of cakes. It has easy cake recipes and fast icing recipes alongside traditional recipes. It has all kinds of instructions and ideas for how to decorate birthday cakes. And it has nearly 50 specialty cakes, some of which make use of combinations of the basic recipes, some of which give you all the recipes you need to make and decorate a cake from start to finish.

All of this is intended to help you make a birthday cake from scratch for someone special in your life, and possibly for many special someones over the course of many years.

Our only concern is that it may make it all look (and sound) easier than it is.

We knew some newlyweds who spent an entire weekend once making a fancy cake from a 1980s issue of Bon Appétit magazine. A few years later, with more cooking experience and better equipment in their kitchen, it took a few hours.

Unless you have some experience, don't attempt some of these cakes without a trial run. Don't attempt any of them at the last minute. Start out with the right equipment, all the needed ingredients, enough time, and a thorough understanding of how the recipes and process work, and you can have an enjoyable, successful experience, that makes the recipient truly happy. But don't underestimate the process or timing unless you have a fool-proof Plan B.

We would also like to see more photos, but understand that we can't have everything.