Rating: - Super!
I've been vegan for just over a year now and I had started to miss things like cheesecake/cakes etc. Then I found this book! It's very easy to follow and the ingredients are all easy to get hold of. Super!
Rating: - Recipes for wholefoods fascists with no imagination.
Upon seeing the cover image of the sumptuous - looking chocolate cake and being taken in by the word 'delicious' in the title, I was wholly disappointed when I received the book to find page upon page of repetitive, bland recipes, an impression which was for me compounded by the lack of pictures and tedious layout.
The recipes are incredibly unimaginative, uninspiring and basic throughout - fried peanut butter sandwich anyone? or maybe something on toast? (and don't even think about using anything other than the coarsest wholemeal bread for that!)The description for this book should make it more clear that it is comprised solely of wholefoods recipes. Everything is BROWN and fibrous, which is fine if you're a masochistic health freak, but not if you want to actually enjoy what you eat.
When someone first goes vegan there's usually already a feeling of being limited, without then choosing odious cookbooks intent upon limiting us to a gritty, beige diet devoid of any form of satisfying fare and instead filled with bran, molasses and wholemeal.
As we all know, the vegan diet is naturally a healthier option, yet the 'indulgent' recipes in this book are as boring as the rest of it. Food like this is fine if a wholefood lifestyle is part of your ethics or you are rigourously health - conscious, but this is not how this book is marketed. The recipes are fine as part of a wider diet, but everyday vegan cooking should not be this depressing!
This book should be cast back to the 1970s where it belongs, and thank goodness that there are now better and more innovative vegan recipe books out there. The only good point is that it gives both British and American measurements, but it also uses American terminologies and often American ingredients which are nigh on impossible to find outside the USA.
Rating: - An awful book
This recipe book has to be the worst in my collection. After cooking about half a dozen meals from it I gave up. True, everything is simple, but simple to the point of bland and boring. I found that I had to revise each and every dish in order to get something with a bit of taste to it. And sometimes the quantities were extremely bizarre; one recipe requires 1lb of potatoes yet states it is suitable for one person - only someone with a huge appetite who has had their taste buds removed!
Rating: - What Is That On Top Of The Cake?
I wouldn't buy this book because of the picture on the front cover. What is that brown stuff on the top of the cake? Bizarre. And what is that white stuff in the middle?
If you scraped the different coloured gunge off the cake it might look all right. A plain chocolate cake. I don't like chocolate much but I could eat that.
If you are a publisher, you put your best picture on the cover to sell your book. This nasty looking cake must be their best and if that's so, they can keep their book.
My usual policy is to avoid looking at vegan cookery books because they only put you off eating vegan food but now and then I check out the vegan cook books to see if anything really good has finally been written in this field. It's time vegan's had their own Elizabeth David. Obviously this isn't it.
Rating: - A little more spice and it'd be perfect!
Does exactly what it says in the title with fairly simple yet innovative ideas. It's divided neatly into sections(ie legumes, nuts etc) making it easy to browse, and has some nutrition advice in the foreward. My only gripe is that I find myself adapting a lot of the recipes to taste, as they can be fairly bland and require a little more seasoning for a spice-fiend like me! Most of the recipes are very healthy, but I'm of the strong belief that wholemeal flour can ruin the taste and texture of sauces and cakes, I just switch it to white and they turn out lovely!