See sample pages from this book at Wink.
Deceptive Desserts: A Lady’s Guide to Baking Bad!
by Christine McConnell
Regan Arts
2016, 288 pages, 8 x 10 x 1 inches
Take a ripened crafter, mix in a pinch of YouTube lessons on cake decorating, blend that with a humorous fascination with the macabre, and you’ve got Christine McConnell’s new cookbook, Deceptive Desserts.
Just four years ago McConnell had never even baked a cake. But she was already a professional makeup and hair stylist, an impeccable photographer (much of which she learned through YouTube), and even created her own vintage-inspired clothes. Then after seeing some online photos of beautiful cakes, she decided to take a few online lessons on cake decorating. In 2013, while perfecting her baking skills, she made a batch of life-sized chocolate tarantula treats out of Girl Scout cookies for Halloween and realized that baking the dark side was her new passion. Her list of ghoulish culinary masterpieces quickly grew, along with her Instagram account, which now has over 248,000 followers.
Deceptive Desserts is a campy yet lavish baking book and visual delight that offers about 50 enchantingly morbid recipes, including Peppermint Brownie Bugs, Mint Chip Medusa Cake, Terror-misu (with creepy ladyfingers gripping the sides of the cake), White Voodoo Cake, Serpentine Cinnamon Rolls, Cat Lady Gelatin, Neopolitan Monster Cake, and her famous Tarantula Cookies. McConnell wears all the hats in this book – writer, inventor of the crafted desserts, creator of the clothes and props for each accompanying photo, glamorous model for said photos – and she pulls it all off with quite a thrill. Each horrific edible looks like an art piece, and yet the recipes seem accessible, even for novices in the kitchen. Deceptive Desserts is the perfect cookbook for any sci-fi and horror-loving baker or crafter.