50 Easy Party Cakes ~ Debbie Brown

Debbie Brown's cakes are awesome. These might be easy party cakes, but if you can manage to pull off a single one of these then everyone (especially the kids) will think you are very, very talented. The great thing about Debbie's book though is that she is very thorough and methodical in stepping you through the cake decorating process, making what looks impossible suddenly not so.


Take for instance the Mouse house cake which is pictured on the cover. Debbie steps you first through colouring the sugarpaste and covering the board and then through cutting, joining and shaping the cakes. Following this she guides you through covering the cake and positioning it on the board, smoothing it and cutting the windows, then replacing them with the black sugarpaste. Her next two steps outline in detail how to make the mice and placing them on the cake, and the last is to step you through adding the stalks and leaves and the chimney. There are photographs of several of the various steps and components, making the shaping of the cake and the moulding of the mice far simpler. Brown has also listed basic recipes for Madeira sponge cake and Sugarpaste at the beginning of the book, and provides a very useful table of bakeware and ingredient quantities required to produce each of the cakes in the book.

It's hard to decide which of the fifty cakes featured are my favourites, as they are all great. I do really like the Castle guards and the Treasure map, and both Dotty dragon and Playful kitten are very cute. The Shopping frenzy cake makes me think of my sister Carmen and my friend Seema, and the Party bags with a little teddy bear in the top of each would be fantastic for a birthday party. Don't make me choose!

Recommended for patient cooks and cake decorating afficionado's.

- Kath