The Cupcake Café

The Cupcake Café Cookbook

by Ann Warren & Joan Lilly

"There is almost nothing in the showcase at the funky Cupcake Café I wouldn't devour with glee... The blossoms on Cupcake Café cakes--a veritable Winterthur of butter cream 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

Question: What draws such stars as Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Barbra Streisand and Mike Nichols into the heart of New York City's Hell's Kitchen?

Answer: The pastries, sweet delights, and renowned cupcakes of Ann Warren, co-owner of The Cupcake Café.

A uniquely idiosyncratic establishment in the heart of Hell's Kitchen for the past ten years, the Cupcake Café is a cozy mecca for all kinds of delicious homemade baked goods, including muffins, scones, coffee cakes, waffles, pies, sticky buns, and doughnuts. But what really packs them in at this funky little eatery are the 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.

Now all home bakers can satisfy their sweet tooth in their own kitchen with Ann Warren's new book, The Cupcake Café Cookbook. In this tell-all cookbook, Ann Warren (with the help of her sister, Joan Lilly) shares her secrets, and teaches the home cook not only how to bake all the Cupcake Café's ambrosial products at home, but also how to decorate with butter cream in her own wildly creative style. The detailed, easy-to-follow instructions provided in The Cupcake Café Cookbook prove that it doesn't take elaborate equipment or years of baking experience to bake, construct, frost, and decorate wonderful cupcakes and cakes the Cupcake Café way. 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 are reflected in everything they do, Ann Warren and Joan Lilly have re-created the whole unique Cupcake Café experience in The Cupcake Café Cookbook. Maybe that's why Country Living magazine has said, "You can bet we will be lining up when The Cupcake Café Cookbook arrives in bookstores."

The Cupcake Café Cookbook
by Ann Warren & Joan Lilly
Doubleday
ISBN: 0-385-48339-2
208 pages
12 full color photographs
Black & white photographs throughout
$25.00 hardcover
Information provided by the publisher.