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| Customer Reviews: | | Average Customer Review: ( 68 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
185 of 203 found the following review helpful:
 Things to know before buying Mar 04, 2006
By cheesefairy
I just got this book today, and even though I haven't made any of the cupcakes yet, I wanted to post this review to make you aware of a few things when you're thinking of whether to buy this book. First, the majority of the recipes require self-rising flour. I don't know about you, but hardly any of the recipes in my other cookbooks require self-rising flour so either I have to buy it or convert these recipes when I use my all purpose flour, which is slightly annoying. Second, two chapters are muffin recipes. He considers muffins to be a subset of cupcakes. I consider cupcakes and muffins to be two different things. Finally, as noted in the editor's description of the book, each recipe has 3 variations (like changing the type of fruit or extract or type of chips from the main recipe). I'm assuming he's counting the variations towards the 500 total. That doesn't bother me, but maybe it matters to you. Knowing all that, I think I still would have bought this book since it's relatively inexpensive, although I would have thought about it longer. The reason why I would have still bought it is because there are many color pictures of the cupcakes, and there are a wide variety of recipes. We'll see how the recipes work when I have a chance to try them.
64 of 67 found the following review helpful:
Not quite cupcakes Oct 26, 2006
By R. Rappaport
Yesterday I received my long awaited copy of 500 Cupcakes (billed as "The Only Cupcake Compendium You'll Ever Need") from Amazon. Now, 500 cupcakes is a lot, and I figured a fair amount of them would be variations on each other (ie. base recipes with several variations) but what I didn't expect was that many of the "cupcakes" would be in fact, muffins.
This is not a "what makes a cupcake a cupcake and not a muffin" issue but there were actually a few chapters devoted to muffin recipes. Dozens of them. Which is well and good, I enjoy a good muffin but I was expecting a cupcake book.
Another bit of oddness was how many of the actual cupcake recipes were savory. To me, this makes several of them, in actuality, muffins. These were in addition to all of the actual muffin recipes.
There were also few icing recipes and many of the cupcakes were not supposed to be iced. Which raises the question: when a cupcake is a flavor like rhubarb and you are not icing it, is it a cupcake or a muffin?
Now, there were some good points, all of the recipes are fairly easy and contain few unusual or hard to find ingredients. There were also a few cupcake recipes for those with dietary concerns, for example, vegan or gluten free.
All in all, it is an affordable book ($10) with lots of ideas for cupcakes and muffins. Just don't buy it thinking you will end up with 500 different cupcake recipes.
46 of 47 found the following review helpful:
 Caution: No milk or water in 90% of recipes = very dry cupcakes! Jun 28, 2008
By Charity A. Clark
Beware of other reviews! Notice that many are only excited to *begin* trying recipes, very few actually have tried them.
I saw this book at Barnes & Noble and had been baking cupcakes for the local farmer's markets. This seemed like a wonderful idea... 500 cupcake recipes, interesting flavors, many seemed like they'd be wonderful.
However, when I got home with the book, I noticed that nearly every recipe excluded milk, water, buttermilk, etc. There were not enough liquids to make the mix into a (cup)cake batter. Instead, it was the consistency of a cookie dough, much too thick for your basic cake batter. Nonetheless, I persisted, thinking that the author knew what they were writing about. The cupcakes (2 different types) turned out so dry that you had to have a drink or you'd choke on them.
Honestly, I think most readers of this "compendium" would agree that the basic vanilla recipe has been altered in many ways. It is obvious that the flawed vanilla recipe was copied and pasted into every other recipe, but the original was flawed, and thus so were all the rest. Please don't buy this book. I am rarely displeased in a purchase and I actually ended up taking this book back to B&N. Instead, try 125 Best Cupcake Recipes or Crazy About Cupcakes. I've tried about 10 total recipes from both and all have worked out beautifully with repeat customers at the farmer's markets. Happy Baking!
11 of 11 found the following review helpful:
 USE CAKE FLOUR! Sep 28, 2006
By J. Crocker
My husband bought this as a gift for me since I LOVE CUPCAKES! I have never baked anything that didn't come from a box, so I was excited to try it. We have tried a few of the recipes and the only suggestion I have is to use cake flour instead of the flours they recommend. When we followed the recipes exactly, the cupcakes didn't seem to be as fluffy as boxed cakes. However, once someone told me to try the cake flour, it made a huge difference. I recommend this book because of the varieties and its is cute too :) PS: I don't like the 500 Cookies book as much.
17 of 19 found the following review helpful:
VERY Dry Cupcakes Aug 14, 2007
By Danette Beitra
I was so excited to get this book, and I was very disappointed. So far, I have made 4 different recipes, and they have all come out so dry that they had to be thrown out! The pictures aren't big enough, and there aren't enough to begin with. All it has is one ingredient variations to make it "count" as another of the 500 recipes....Oh...and they aren't all cupcakes....most are muffins....
See all 68 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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