Review and Giveaway: Jo Pratt’s “Madhouse Cooking” & Juliet Stallwood’s “The Icing on The Cake”

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As you might already know, we have a slight addiction to cookbooks and cupcakes in this house, so when the lovely people from Duncan Baird Publishing got in touch and asked, if we’d like to add Jo Pratt’s “Madhouse Cookbook” and Juliet Stallwood’s “The Icing On The Cake” to our ever-growing cookbook collection, I instantly agreed. Fun family meals and pretty cakes are my favourites, so I just couldn’t let this opportunity pass, but this shall be enough of an introduction to this post. Let’s see what I thought of both books and keep reading, because there’ll be a lovely little giveaway at the bottom of this post!

Jo Pratt’s “Madhouse Cookbook” has something that not many cookbooks have: a cover that is so inviting that you instantly want to sit down with a pen and paper and start meal planning. Unfortunately, a week only has seven days and if we had written down everything that we liked the look of, we’d have had a meal plan sorting us out until mid-September. I am not joking! This book is amazing and just what every busy family needs in their life. It contains dozens of family-friendly meals that you can prepare ahead or simply rustle up after work and also feature delicious cakes and dishes for dinner parties with kids, which I find a particularly great idea! The food design and photography is just beautiful and I can literally not find anything negative to say about this book. It doesn’t even ask for crazy or super expensive or rate ingredients! Big thumbs up from us.

Jo Pratt’s “Madhouse Cookbook” is available in every good bookstore or on Amazon.

Now the thing with books on cake decorating is that either, the book gets its step-by-step guides right or it doesn’t and if it doesn’t, it’s not worth being in my book collection. Juliet Stallwood’s book “The Icing On The Cake”gets it right, so it now has a nice space on my almost bursting bookshelf. The book itself features a selection of different designs from celebration cakes to cupcakes and includes a chapter on all the tools you might need when recreating designs from the book. The step-by-step guides on how to achieve different cake designs are beautifully pictured and very well explained plus there is an extra chapter on tips, tricks, downloadable templates and everything else you will ever need to know when decorating cakes. All in all, this is a well thought out book and if you are after a reliable book that inspires you to get creative without driving you insane with complicated instructions, then this is the one book you should add to your collection.

Juliet Stallwood’s “The Icing on The Cake” is available in every good bookstore or on Amazon.

Now to the fun part for you. I have two book sets to give away to two lucky readers. To win, simply fill in the Rafflecopter below and as always, make sure to enter correctly as fake and incomplete entries won’t be entered into the draw. Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

The Prize Finder – UK Competitions

Disclosure: I was provided with a copy of both books for the purpose of this review.