An illustrated step-by-step guide to perfect cakes, fillings, and frostings.

How to Make an American Layer Cake not only explains the basics of preparing yellow, white, and chocolate layer cakes but also demonstrates cake making with 40 exquisitely rendered line drawings. You will also find recipes for frostings and fillings. Frostings include buttercreams, decorating frostings that can be piped through a pastry bag, chocolate cream, meringue, and whipped cream. Fillings include coconut-pecan and lemon curd.

Step-by-step cake-decorating tips demonstrate basic frosting techniques as well as how to use a pastry bag and how to make shell borders, rosettes, and stars. How to Make an American Layer Cake also gives you hard-to-find professional tips. Learn about insulating cake pans, improvising pastry bags, precisely measuring batters when baking in two pans, and greasing pans (tip: never use butter!) There are master recipes for yellow, white, and chocolate cakes, plus many variations, including strawberry layer cake, orange layer cake, spice cake with meringue frosting, buttermilk layer cake, coconut layer cake, devil's food cake, old-fashioned chocolate layer cake, sour cream-fudge layer cake, German chocolate cake, and many more.

Beautifully designed, illustrated, and bound, this classic book is the perfect reference for anyone who wants to make a cake from scratch that tastes as good as it looks.