This is a delicious almond-flavoured coffee cake studded with tart rhubarb bits with a crunchy toasted almond topping.

The cake comes together easily from basic pantry items. It’s quite dense despite the use of cake flour, but does have a fine crumb that’s kept moist by the fruit that’s baked in. There’s an omission in the recipe: sliced almonds are listed among the cake ingredients but no direction is given. I added them to the batter with the fruit.

Overall, the cake was good and stayed moist for days but I found it too sweet and would have preferred more fruit. I, however, was in the minority!

These are lovely orange-scented scones chock full of tangy bits of apricot and crunchy pistachios.

The recipe is for a basic buttermilk scone dough which I put together in just a few minutes in the food processor. Instead of just kneading briefly and patting the dough out, Ms Braker has you take the very shaggy dough, roll it out, fold it into thirds business letter style and roll again before cutting, building the layers of flattened butter into the dough to ensure a flaky texture. After cutting, the scones are brushed with buttermilk and sprinkled with turbinado sugar as the finishing touch. I made these the night before and baked them from a frozen state; they were done within the allotted time.

The scone is buttery and only slightly sweet and would be a great vehicle for whatever nuts, fruit etc you may have on hand…..I think chocolate chips and dried cherries may be next…..

It’s the crunchy streusel topping on this tender, buttery banana cake that earns this recipe 5 stars.

Made with cake flour and butter and using the standard creaming method, this cake is nothing like a dense or coarse-crumbed banana bread; the crumb is fine, moist and delicate. I chose to bake it in a loaf pan and the one I own always takes longer than a recipe states so it took an extra 10 minutes. I couldn’t imagine inverting the cake topping side down and then righting it again, so I lined the pan with parchment first, making certain the piece was large enough to overhang the pan edges creating handles. After cooling in the pan for 30 minutes, the cake was easily lifted from it without any loss of streusel.

It was really delicious but a little too fragile to slice thinly because the cake was so tall. Next time I’ll bake in a square pan….baking time is much shorter and it will be much easier to serve.

It may look like a giant sticky bun, but there’s far more to this yeasted coffee cake than that….

The dough itself is beautiful…..tender and airy and lightly spiced with cardamom, and very easy to make. It mixes up like a thick cake batter, but after its first rise, can be rolled out easily. It’s spread with a cinnamon-butter mixture and cut into strips which are then coiled around each other. There’s a trick to finding the correct tension for the coil which I didn’t quite master: the centre of mine was coiled too tightly, so it rose up, and the outer layers were coiled too loosely, so they spread outwards, resulting in an uneven cake.

The dough is baked in a butterscotch sauce after its second rise. I lost a little of this sauce through a leak in my springform pan, but there was still enough to glaze the top of the cake and add a little sweetness, but not enough to detract from the star of this dessert, the yeasted cake.

This is a very festive cake which I made for our Canada Day celebration, using the author’s signature yellow butter cake (page 348), cream cheese buttercream and beautiful, local strawberries.

This review is for the buttercream and finished cake only as the cake portion was reviewed separately.

The frosting starts as a classic French buttercream made with egg yolks, hot sugar syrup and butter. In this recipe, part of the butter is replaced with cream cheese. The addition of gelatin (I used agar agar) and powdered sugar should have been a warning to me that this was going to be a soft frosting that needed stabilizers to help it set. And it was…. so soft it was almost pourable at 70F. I could work with it chilled to 60F but it was difficult to maintain this temperature as my kitchen was 70F with the help of air conditioning.

The cakes were split horizontally and 2 layers spread with red currant jelly. A layer of buttercream and fresh strawberries filled the centre of the cake. The flavour was quite nice but you can’t really go wrong with juicy, summer berries and vanilla cake and the cream cheese buttercream complemented the fruit beautifully.

Overall, the cake was a huge success but I won’t ever make that buttercream again …….

I’ve never understood eggnog as a beverage, but with eggs, cream, sugar and nutmeg as some of its components, I can appreciate its merits as a baking ingredient. This moist cake is how all eggnog should be consumed: by the slice, redolent with nutmeg and studded with rum-soaked currants.

I followed the recipe exactly and it turned out perfectly. The cake was a lovely golden yellow colour with a very fine crumb; I particularly liked the effect of the sugar-water-rum glaze which dried to form a sparkling, crispy crust.

This delicious cake is the perfect embodiment of one of the flavours of the holiday season…. It was so popular, I baked a second batch in small loaf pans to give as gifts.

This was a really delicious moist chocolate cake made with cocoa powder only that could easily stand alone. The frangipane added delicious almond flavour and would have added visual interest had my 2 layers not melded together and sunk to the bottom of the cake! (I missed the instructions to refrigerate it before assembling the cake so that may have been the problem).

A fudgy chocolate brownie baked on top of a crispy, buttery shortbread base….. 2 treats in every bite.

The recipe is easy but involves baking in stages. First, the shortbread ingredients are whizzed together in a food processor, pressed into a cake pan and baked. Then, a chocolate-y saucepan brownie is poured on top and sprinkled with finely chopped nuts before baking. The recipe calls for hazelnuts but I used pecans instead. There’s no need to toast the nuts in advance as they toast during baking. The yield was supposed to be 36 (1 ½” squares) but I cut them smaller and got 49.

These are extremely rich and a little goes a long way but they are delicious.

This is a beautiful tender butter cake with a fine crumb and good vanilla flavour.

It’s made using the creaming method and contains the standard ingredients though it does have egg yolks in addition to whole eggs – hence the lovely pale yellow colour.

Flo Braker provides ingredient weights as well as volume measurements and her instructions are very detailed …… this is a no-fail cake if you follow these precisely. She mentions that the cakes dome when they’re baked, but I used cake strips and they baked up perfectly flat.

The recipe makes 2 - 9” layers or 3 - 8” - a perfect base for a special occasion cake. I used it for Cupid’s Strawberry Cake.

The house smelled heavenly while this baked. And the finished cake tasted even better!

The texture was nice and moist – courtesy of the yogurt, or perhaps the ½ lb butter required – and had a very complex flavour: it was nicely spiced, without one ingredient being predominant, with a nice kick provided by black pepper. Ground walnuts in place of some of the flour, and orange rind were nice complements to the spice mix.

I’m unfamiliar with this author so I was happy to see that the instructions were clear and baking times, accurate; it baked up beautifully in the time mentioned in the recipe.

The author suggests serving it with mangoes, which I did. Delicious!