A uniquely idiosyncratic New York establishment, The Cupcake Café is a cozy mecca for lovers of all kinds of delicious homemade baked goods, including muffins, scones, coffee cakes, waffles, pies, sticky buns, and doughnuts. But it is best known for its fanciful cakes and cupcakes, elaborately decorated with homemade butter cream frosting. From many-tiered wedding cakes to tiny cupcakes covered in fresh fields of flowers, to sheet cakes embellished in vivid colors with virtually any scene you can describe or imagine, The Cupcake Café's baked goods are renowned for tasting even better than they look. In The Cupcake Café Cookbook, Ann Warren shares all her secrets, teaching the home cook not only how to bake all of the Café's ambrosial products, but also how to decorate with butter cream in her own wildly fanciful style. Photographs in color and black-and-white, as well as detailed instructions for mixing colors, shaping flowers, and creating balance, bring even the most elaborate decorating techniques well within the ability of any home baker. Writing not only with incomparable expertise, but also with the irreverence and wit that characterize everything she does, Ann Warren has re-created the entire unique Cupcake Café experience in book form. The Cupcake Café Cookbook is a gem for everyone who loves doughnuts, originally decorated cakes, or off-beat New York City eateries. The actual café is a funky daytime oasis in the still-iffy neighborhood once known as Hell's Kitchen. Ann Warren and her husband, Michael, started the café as a bakery in 1988. They now serve food, too, but their fame comes from the breakfast baked goods and Warren's strikingly creative butter cream-frosted cakes and cupcakes. You have to smile at Warren suggesting her doughnuts are health food because they're made from scratch with natural ingredients and eaten without butter or cream cheese. You will certainly enjoy every recipe for them and all of the muffins, scones and sticky buns, too. Warren's use of butter cream for decorating cakes with cascades of colorful flowers and other original designs is so magical that even Madonna and Mick Jagger have ordered from her. If you have an ounce of manual dexterity, Warren's detailed guidance on cake decorating will send you into orbit. Photos showing how to make the flower-encrusted cakes for which Cupcake Café is famous also a help. --Dana Jacobi Although Warren and her husband opened The Cupcake Cafe with the idea of developing a wholesale doughnut business, it's the beautifully decorated cakes and cupcakes for which their somewhat funky establishment in New York City's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood is famous. With coauthor Lilly (her sister), Warren provides recipes for all the sweet baked goods the bakery/cafe offers, from those doughnuts to muffins and other "breakfast baked goods" to cookies, pies, and cakes. Most of the recipes are simple, and many are for old favorites like Cherry Pie or Oatmeal Cookies, but for those interested in duplicating Warren's gorgeous cakes and cupcakes (she has an art background, and now she paints with buttercream), there is a lengthy illustrated section on techniques. Recommended for most baking collections. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. "The blossoms on Cupcake Café cakes--a veritable Winterthur of buttercream botanicals--set co-owner Ann Warren's cakes apart...Her colors, shapes, and arrangements seem to bloom from roots beneath the frosting." --New York magazine diosyncratic New York establishment, The Cupcake Café is a cozy mecca for lovers of all kinds of delicious homemade baked goods, including muffins, scones, coffee cakes, waffles, pies, sticky buns, and doughnuts. But it is best known for its fanciful cakes and cupcakes, elaborately decorated with homemade butter cream frosting. From many-tiered wedding cakes to tiny cupcakes covered in fresh fields of flowers, to sheet cakes embellished in vivid colors with virtually any scene you can describe or imagine, The Cupcake Café's baked goods are renowned for tasting even better than they look. In The Cupcake Café Cookbook, Ann Warren shares all her secrets, teaching the home cook not only how to bake all of the Café's ambrosial products, but also how to decorate with butter cream in her own wildly fanciful style. Photographs in color and black-and-white, as well as detailed instructions for mixing colors, shaping flowers, and creating balance, bring even the mos Ann Warren and her sister and coauthor, Joan Lilly, were born in Brooklyn, New York. Ann studied at the Art Students League, the Brooklyn Museum School, and the National Academy, but she credits the High School of Art and Design with teaching her how to write on a cake. She met her husband, Michael, now her partner at The Cupcake Café, when they were both working at the Well-Bred Loaf. Joan has a B.A. in anthropology from Boston University, a B.A. in English from Hunter College, and an M.S.W. from Fordham Universi