Links and Books

On this page, find cooking websites and cook books along with reviews of them! If you would like me to review a book, comment!

Newest Review: Allrecipes.com

Look out for these reviews:

• Foodwishes.com
• The International Cookbook For Kids By Matthew Locricchio

Perfect Cupcakes delicious, easy, and fun to make  copyright 2008 Weldon Owen Inc.

Review: I love this book! Truly! This is the first cupcake specializing cookbook that I have ever owned and love it.  I find that the recipes are really good, and instructions are clear.  Also the pictures are elegant and fun to look at.  My only complaints are that the recipes don't make a lot of cupcakes, and that they don't give a standard size cupcake.  This means that the cupcakes that the book is making are different sizes.  If you want to make 6 cupcakes using the pecan coffee cake recipe, and make other cupcakes using the same size pan, they will make different sized cupcakes.Overall I love this book and would definitely recommend it to any experienced baker, but for a beginner I wouldn't because some of the recipes are kind of complicated.


Cooks.com Click here to access!

Review: Honestly, I hate Cooks.com.  You might be surprised to hear that.  It's one of those website that leads me to screaming in frustration because they just don't have what I want.  A lot of the time they have recipes where they use something canned, or they use some obscure ingredient that I don't think anyone has in their kitchen.  I also find it a bit hard to navigate around their website, because there are so many buttons to click, and it just doesn't get me where I want to go.  Also the website itself isn't very attractive.  But on occasion you get a great recipe that you use tons of times.  I like to go there only when I can't find a good recipe anywhere else.


Sweet Treats by Williams-Sonoma

Review: I like this book a lot, the recipes are great, and the set of the book is really easy to navigate through.  I personally love the strawberry shortcake recipe, and the golden layer cake.  At the start they give a list of recipes as well as tools, which I love, because a lot of the time I am making something, and in the middle realize that I don't have something they are asking me to use.  Later they have a row that state a problem you may have, and then they give a way to avoid it.  Then, after everything they give variations of the recipe, how helpful!  My only complain was at some of the recipe selections, like the "Chocolate Galore" section didn't really have that many options that looked good, and their selection of cookies wasn't great.  In the end I really liked this book, and would recommend it to everyone, especially beginning bakers, because it really guides you through how to do every step.

The Usborne First Cookbook by Angela Wilkes

Review:  I did not like this book.  There, I said it.  I found the pictures unappetizing and some recipes were just something like hamburgers or something similar to that.  I found the book confusing and the little people who were doing everything were just distracting. The appetizers are the best part, which is annoying, since at my house we don't normally have much of an appetizer.  There are a few dinners, and out of the few none of them look very good.  Once we get into the desert section, they had boring deserts, one of them taught us how to peel and slice oranges.  Come on guys! You can do better.  Though some recipes I have used a couple times and I love, there are about three of those, out of about 60.  I haven't used this cookbook much, and I would not recommend buying it.


Real Simple Best Recipes easy, delicious meals

Review: This could quite possibly be my favorite cookbook.  I love how elegant the pictures are, and how many there are.  They have so many categories, they have a pasta section, vegetarian section, seafood, soups, everything!  The recipes are good, quick, and everyone will love them, even me.  I have no complaints and would recommend having this cookbook as the base cookbook for everything food in your house.


Kids' fun & healthy Cookbook by Nicola Graimes

Review: I'm not crazy about this book, but there a a lot of great recipes in it.  I think it has a really fun and funky inside.  I think it has some really great recipes in it.  I also like how it has a lot of fun facts about the dish, and ingredients.  My only complain is that I feel like I'm being judges when reading it, like my diet isn't a good one, also some of the recipes don't seem that healthy to me.  Some of the deserts seem like the author just said they were healthy because they have a lot of fruit in them.  Overall, I like this book, but think it could be kind of offensive to some people.


Mom and Me Cookbook by Annabel Karmel

Review: Not my favorite book. I will start with what I like about it, because I don't really hate it, or love it.  I like the format of it, it's really easy to read and the recipes are clear.  I like how it tells how many it serves, and I can tell you from experience that this book actually, believe it or not, gives the correct serving size.  I am also impressed at the complexity of some of the recipes, like the pizza dough recipe.  Though it has some very complicated recipes, I didn't like the simplicity of others, like the chocolate sundae, which was just muffin, vanilla ice cream and a chocolate bar.  I also found that a lot of the book was on decorating the food, in a childish way.  So I would say that this wouldn't be a good book for experienced cooks, and rather a good book for a young kid and their mom, hence the name.


The Apple Cookbook by Olwen Woodier

Review:  I really liked this cookbook.  There were so many different sections to make recipes from.  The deserts were fairly simple and delicious. Also, since the recipes used mostly ingredients that I have at my house, I could just pick up an apple and make something delicious! And there were tons of recipes, at least a hundred in there, so many to choose from!  I really liked a soup that I made.  My complaints are that occasionally the use of apple in the recipe was apple juice or apple cider, which I normally don't have at my house.  Some of the recipes turned out too sweet and kind of strange tasting, while others were just sweet enough and classics that I'll be making for years.  It would also be nice for it to have pictures, to show how it should turn out, for that reason I would definitely recommend this cookbook to any experienced, apple loving cook who has way too many apples on hand.



Allrecipes.com

Review:  I really like allrecipes.com.  First of all, the website is very pretty.  It is also very easy to navigate through.  You can find exactly the recipe you want by only clicking.  If you end up needing to look up a recipe, you can look it up by name or look it up by the ingredient you want.  Once you find a recipe you can look at related recipes, or in the case of some recipes, watch a cooking video.  The cooking videos are really fun to watch, I have started it watch them for fun, which is kind of weird.  They are just so pleasant!  You can look at reviews that are made by smart, experienced cooks.  Sometimes people give ideas on how to change the recipe to make it better or easier.  One complaint I do have about the reviews is that sometimes people have made a mistake in the recipe or something, and when they comment they blame the recipe.  I also like how you can put a recipe in your recipe box so you can go back and find it later.  One problem I do have is with the printing process.  I don't have a color printer, so when I click the "Print" button it takes me to a page where the recipe is formatted better than the original page, but I can't change the color to only black, and it still has all this random stuff that I don't need to have on the recipe.  I end up clicking "Print" and then highlighting it and pasting it to a word document.  There I delete all the random stuff I don't need and change the color.  I'll add that you can still function on the website rather well even if you haven't "gone pro" which I haven't.