Rating: 
Summary: GREAT BOOK
Review: This is a wonderful book. It is chocked full of great recipes using cake mixes as the base. I have already made a couple of the recipes and got rave reviews. I found a lot of recipes in this book that I personally will use again and again.
Rating:
Summary: Most Useful Cookbook Ever!
Review: This is simply the best cookbook I have ever purchased! I love to bake and when I saw it at first I was skeptical.....Boy was I wrong! I have cooked over 1/2 of the recipes and have yet to have any bad turnouts. The recipes are easy and so easy to keep stocked in the pantry for those last minute desserts. Not only do I love the book but I give it as wedding gifts, housewarming gifts and hostess gifts. I have yet had someone say they don't use it all the time.
Rating:
Summary: A book that will be well used!
Review: I bought this book about 4 months ago,i looked through it and then set it aside.I remembered it last week and started baking.I have since made the Carrot Cake,Honey-Bun Cake,Gooey Butter Cake and the New York Cheesecake.Each one has been easy to make and everyone has said they taste great too!There are still more that we will make and i'm sure they'll have the same results.
Rating:
Summary: GREAT recipes, and so EASY!
Review: I love to bake, but with two little ones, I rarely have time to focus on complicated recipes. These cakes are simply FABULOUS, and believe me, no one knows that they're from a mix. The Cake Doctor offers a kind of medicine found in no pharmacy that I know of -- the healing power of cake! Congratulations on a wonderful, and necessary, cookbook!
Rating:
Summary: WOW! You gotta buy this book!
Review: Lots of wonderful, EASY recipes that anybody, even a lazy cook like me can handle! I Love This Book! What could be simpler than adding a little of this, or a smidgen of that to everyday cake mix, and achieving such awesome, tastes-like-it's-from-scratch cakes? I can't wait to try them ALL!
Rating: 
Summary: great recipes, but missing some good ones...
Review: This book has a multitude of cake mix cakes -- the Banana and Cannoli cakes sound particularly yummy. The author also covers coffee cakes, those really down home favorites (such as Pig Pickin Cake, made with mandarin oranges and pistachio pudding in the frosting), and quite a few yummy chocolate cakes including Peppermint, Almond, and Mississippi Mud. She also DOES include basic yellow and white cakes at the end of the book (telling you to add a full stick of butter and whole eggs and milk). And she also specifically tells you which cakes to use "pudding in the mix" mixes for and which ones not to (pudding in the mix tends to make the cake very wet) and I feel this is easy to comply with since both types of mixes are available at the store.However, the book does miss some yummy-sounding cake mix recipes that I've found such as Jello Poke Cake, Coconut Poke Cake (made by pouring condensed milk & cream of coconut on top of the hot cake) and Watergate Cake (these are the cakes that make cake mixes fun, in my opinion). I thought this book--with its myriad of recipes--would be all-inclusive. I also wish there were more indulgent-type cakes such as the Banana w/ Caramel Frosting. Too many are bundt/coffee-type cakes which aren't as appealing in a cake mix form to me.
Rating:
Summary: 2 must haves: The Joy of Cooking and The Cake Mix Doctor!
Review: Let's just say that I'm buying a copy for all my friends (and I've gained 5 pounds since getting it)
Rating:
Summary: 5-Star Idea, 3-Star Execution
Review: I share the other reviewersÕ enthusiasm for this book and will no doubt continue to use it from time to time. ThereÕs a sound idea here, and IÕm surprised no one thought of enhancing cake mixes with added ingredients until now. What disappointed me was the authorÕs exclusion of old favoritesÑ even the obvious ones Ñ at the expense of too much variety and too much innovation. The cookbook author in her got the best of her and decided to eschew old standards like yellow cake with chocolate frosting (who doesnÕt like that?) or white cake with chocolate frosting (ditto). Instead, we get less crowd-pleasing combinations such as lemon and chocolate or less kid-friendly items such as biscotti (not a cake anyway). At the risk of being redundant: Would it have been too much to include a basic yellow cake and chocolate frosting among the dozens of other recipes? Some of these recipes are conceptually and technically flawed as well. One of the authorÕs favorite methods of making cakes moister is to add a box of instant pudding to the cake mix. Fair enough, but for the fact that the cake mix manufacturers were onto this idea even before the author was -- itÕs difficult to find a cake mix these days that doesnÕt already have pudding in it (both Pillsbury and Betty Crocker mixes have pudding). Thus, weÕre left with the (unanswered) dilemma: Do we add pudding mix to the pudding in the mix, or leave well enough alone with whatÕs already in the mix? This sounds silly, I know; but precision and exactitude are, after all, important in baking. The author uses the Òinstant pudding mixÓ trick very frequently, asking us to add instant lemon and pistachio puddings to various cake mixes to create new flavors. In my last trip to a very large supermarket, those items were not in stock. IÕm not even sure they exist. There were lemon and pistachio puddings, but not instant ones. Again: do we go ahead and use the non-instant ones? Should we only use instant puddings? What if we canÕt find instant pistachio pudding? Finally, I even found that something as rudimentary as the baking times for some of these cakes were off. In one, the cake mix box said to bake for 32-35 minutes, but the ÒdoctoredÓ recipe said to bake for 45-47 minutes. You would think that the ÒdoctoredÓ recipe would supersede the undoctored one, but not so. The cake would have been burnt -- inedible -- if I had left it in for 45 minutes. It was already golden brown at 32 minutes. How does an author make a 13-minute mistake like that? Mistakes like that donÕt inspire confidence to follow other recipes. Despite these criticisms, thereÕs much here that is good. Use vanilla instant pudding and flavored extracts if you canÕt find the more ÒexoticÓ ones the author requires. Try to find cake mixes without pudding in them already. Check cakes for doneness according to both the cake mix recipe and the cake doctorÕs recipe. YouÕll probably have good results. And if you come up with a great, time-saving yellow cake and chocolate frosting cake-mix enhancement recipe, let me know!
Rating:
Summary: A book NOT to be passed by
Review: Once you use a cake mix, it is hard to go back to baking from scratch. They are just so good and invariably draw raves. This is a great book for those of us who like to entertain but are short on time. I have the usual file of desserts that can be made using a cake mix, trifle etc, and plan to buy extras of this book to pass along to other family members who like to bring dessert to the latest get-together.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent recipes, that are easy
Review: You must ignore the pictures which to me are awful looking. I baked two of the cheese cakes, New York, and Italian, however I ignored the suggested pan to use and replaced with a 11 inch spring form pan..The results were not only beautiful, but the BEST cheese cakes I have ever eaten. Why on earth she would use 13 by 9 pans and show such poor looking results when one can achieve such splendor is beyond me. I baked a coconut cake in a bundt pan that was so beautiful and delicious it makes me want to tear out the ridiculous pictures and poor pan suggestions. This book is a real find for any gourmet chef with imagination. Some of the names for these cakes are ridiculous but if all these are ignored this book is a great find. Every cake tried was exceptional.
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