Caroline Wright

There is a cake soulmate out there for every person and every moment, if you just know where to look. Take chocolate. A purist savors its pristine richness, yet for others chocolate is best enjoyed married with fresh mint, bourbon, caramel, coconut, chiles, or perhaps just a hint of salt. If cake is a canvas to paint our flavor fantasies upon, then a cookbook that treats its endless variations and delightful possibilities with the proper reverence is long overdue. Ingeniously applying a Choose Your Own Adventure–style methodology to the art of baking mouthwatering cakes for every taste, CAKE MAGIC! Mix & Match Your Way To 100 Amazing Combinations is an utterly new, highly-visual kind of cookbook that showcases beautiful color photos of every cake in the book to choose from in the front, followed by core recipes in the back. And, to ensure that everyone really is able to have their cake and eat it, too, Wright includes gluten-free and vegan variations for nearly every cake, syrup, and frosting in the book. She also shares indispensible tips on adapting the method to all pan shapes, measuring ingredients, making substitutions, troubleshooting wonky cakes, freezing baked cakes, and extremely simple frosting and decorating techniques. Armed with a plethora of delicious flavor adventures to choose from and easy-to-follow instructions for how to get there, the cake’s destination is up to you. CAKE MAGIC! just offers 100 great reasons to make the trip. Introducing an innovative and remarkably easy new way to make 100 delectable, flavorful cakes, author CAROLINE WRIGHT shares a simple five-ingredient homemade dry mix that forms the foundation for every cake in the book. From there, it’s just a matter of mixing and matching a batter, a flavoring syrup (the professional baker’s secret weapon that imbues the cake with additional flavor and moisture), a frosting, and the occasional topping. By following Wright’s mix-and-match method, it’s possible to introduce nearly endless changes on the same basic cake batter just by switching up the flavoring syrups and frostings.