Bake and Decorate, Tea Time Luxury by Fiona Cairns (Quadrille Publishing)

The other day I received the beautiful book Bake and Decorate, Tea Time Luxury by Fiona Cairns, from Quadrille Publishing.  It was such a lovely treat to receive on a cold and blustery weekend.  I stole a couple of hours 'me time' to curl up on the sofa to look through it on Sunday. 

The book is broken down into 2 sections: bake, and decorate, and each of these into 3 sub sections: big cakes, small cakes and biscuits.  This makes it very easy to find a project to suit your needs.  Within the bake section you will find the ingredients and instructions for the baked goods, with a key at the end detailing suitable pages from the decorate section.  In the decorate section, yep you guessed it, you will find ingredients and directions for decorating projects to suit the various cakes and biscuits.  I find this really useful as a lot of baking books jumble both stages together compromising the detail in instructions leaving a large margin for error when interpreting abbreviated instructions.

The projects in the book are aimed at the home baker and do not require knowledge of difficult techniques.  The end results however are beautiful and will leave your guest in awe at your skills.  There are a few more elaborate cakes which could be attempted when you have built your confidence on some of the smaller projects but even these do not employ any difficult techniques.  The use of trimmings and sweets throughout as decorations have also inspired me and given me lots of ideas for pretty finishing touches that will need absolutely no effort on my part, other than walking to the shop that is!

The book is beautifully styled and the photographs are stunning(just look at the cover above), and as each project has an accompanying photograph you can very easily compare your attempts.  Finally, the baking and decorating tips at the start are fantastic and provide great advice for anyone thinking of popping their baking cherry.  If like me, you have been baking for a while already, I think you will also find some great tips to help improve your baking.  I know I did.

I have ear marked, well, pretty much everything to try out but cannot wait to get stuck into some of the festive projects over the next few weeks.  Bake and Decorate, Tea Time Luxury by Fiona Cairns is published by Quadrille Publishing and is available to order from Amazon.