Let them eat cupcakes
New York City's Magnolia Bakery has helped bring cupcakes, those adorable little bites of crumb and icing, out of the realm of children's birthday parties and into high society. Their colorful cupcakes grace the cover of "More from Magnolia: Recipes from the World-Famous Bakery and Allysa Torey's Home Kitchen" (Simon & Schuster, $27). The book follows "The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook," which came out in 1999, three years after Torey opened the bakery.


To review this book without trying Magnolia's cupcake recipe would be like going to Disneyland and not riding the rides. Torey says that the most popular cupcake at the bakery is the "vanilla vanilla" — vanilla cupcakes with vanilla icing. So despite my own leaning towards chocolate, I baked the "vanilla vanilla." The cupcake recipe was simple, but does require a mix of all-purpose and self-rising flour, which might require some cooks to hit the grocery store to pick up a bag of self-rising. The cupcakes were moist and sweet, living up to their marquee position on the book's cover. I was slightly less pleased with the vanilla buttercream icing, which the book notes is technically not a butter cream, but simply a powdered sugar and butter frosting. To me it was overwhelmingly sweet and a little cloying, too much to take in the heavy dollops shown in the book's photos.

While quick breads may not have the cachet of Magnolia's cupcakes, I love them, and tried two of them from the book. I can never pass up a banana-bread recipe, and Magnolia's banana bread with coconut and pecans vanished as quickly as I could slice it. While not as sweet as many recipes, the bread had a nice heft to it, and the coconut blended well with the bananas. I also baked two loaves of the zucchini-walnut bread, from a recipe Torey notes she's been tweaking since she was a teen. She might want to keep tweaking: It baked up high and beautiful, but there just wasn't a lot of taste to the bread — and this from a zucchini-bread fan. The iced ginger cookies were a snappy, sharp delight, but they looked so beautiful fresh out of the oven that I couldn't bring myself to ice them.

Baking books are my favorite kind of cookbook, and "More from Magnolia" has the feminine elegance I expect from a cookbook about sweets. While there aren't as many photos as I would like, and they're all gathered together instead of distributed throughout the book, the photos that are there make the dishes look so luscious I want to bake every one of them.

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