In 2012, baking and Internet sensation Christine McConnell had never made a cake. Like many people, she enjoyed looking at beautiful confections posted online, and she decided to master the skills required to make them by watching YouTube tutorials and trying her hand at baking. In Deceptive Desserts: A Lady's Guide to Baking Bad, she shares her creative designs, which are often labor-intensive and offer a playful touch of the macabre. The skills needed vary from recipe to recipe, with Chocolate Squid Gelatin being one of the easier recipes, and Mackinac Island Fudge, which she shapes into an architectural wonder in the likeness of the Grand Hotel, among the most challenging and time-consuming.
The cookbook reviews the various accouterments required and provides basic foundation recipes used in later sections, like white cake and chocolate buttercream frosting. McConnell offers a Decorating 101 so readers can learn skills such as how to create buttercream roses and build cake stands. The elaborate desserts--arranged by the four seasons--are extraordinary, but the photography here really stands out. For many recipes, McConnell poses in settings and costumes that enhance each concept and theme, often giving them a humorous horror feel. Even her Hummingbird Cake--a beautiful blue-and-white confection with cream-cheese frosting and small hummingbirds that appear to be drinking from the cake's flowers--is given a darker side as McConnell is depicted wielding a knife, ready to stab. Aspiring and professional bakers alike will find McConnell's approach to baking a wild delight. --Justus Joseph, bookseller at Elliott Bay Book Company