Comments: "Quick" and "easy" surely must be relative terms when speaking of wedding cakes. It makes sense, though, if you think about it – surely some must be more quickly and easily made than others. These cakes claim to fall into that category, but you would not necessarily know from looking at the pictures.

The challenge of using a book like this is rounding up all the molds, cake pans, cutters, flowers, candies, ribbons, trim, etc. so that you can replicate these cakes. The value of using a book like this is in gathering ideas so that you can approximate many or most of these cakes, and so that you can come up with some of your own. Almost all of the 22 cakes in this book look beautiful and surely one would be suitable for almost any wedding.

The book is British, but means to be relevant to the English-speaking world. The section on cake decorating suppliers in the back lists sources in Britain, the USA and Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. But, be aware, not every product is available everywhere (the hardener gun tragacanth is very hard to find in the US, for example), and you may have trouble deciphering some of the British words (a posy pick is a plastic tube used to affix flowers to a cake; confectioner's varnish is a gloss, but we have not been able to find a version commercially available in the US.)

The book starts with a section on helpful and necessary equipment. This is followed by a section of cake recipes (light fruit, rich fruit, carrot, chocolate, and a firm sponge), filling and icing recipes, sugarpaste (fondant), marzipan, royal icing, flower and modeling paste, ganache and modeling chocolate recipes, in a wide variety of sizes and volumes. There is a section on assembling and supporting cakes in general, followed by the step-by-step instructions for the 22 cake designs themselves.

You can do the calculations from the recipe section in the front, but it would be useful if every finished cake recipe stated how many portions it produces.

If you're going to bite the bullet and make someone's wedding cake – no matter how quick & easy these cakes turn out to be – charge them extra and make one from start to finish a couple of weeks before the actual event so that you know exactly how long it will take.