Dangerous Desserts

Rating:
Summary: Scrumptious desserts
Review: The recipes look delicious and this cookbook features large color pictures for each dessert that help you figure out whether your dessert look right or not. Looking at the pictures made me hungry!

Rating:
Summary: Dangerously Lousy British Desserts
Review: This book is a collage of recipes of several dozen authors. It is, judging from the BBC publishing imprimatur, an adjutant to a British TV series. According to the publishing data, the recipes are from the magazine Good Food and its vegetarian sibling.

The recipes are brief, and lacking in useful detail. The average home cook will be able to execute the recipes only with significant difficulty. Some of the recipes are complicated, multiple part efforts, yet they the procedures are always casually tossed off in a few sentences. It appears that the instructions were edited down so that each recipe occupies the same editorial space on a page. It was difficult to take the recipes seriously; they are more useful as entertainment. More surprisingly, few of the recipes were very appealing.

The food styling is exemplary. The large, glossy photos are immensely appealing, and almost every recipe has a matching picture. It makes a fine coffee table book, but a lousy cookbook. The organization leaves something to be desired; the chapter "Hot Stuff" is a dumping ground for recipes that do not fit in any other chapter, not to mention all those god-awful steamed puddings. I recommend it mainly for fans of the Good Cook magazine and/or British desserts (recipes for pancakes not withstanding).