Nearly 1,000 crowd-pleasing and award-winning recipes presented in an easy, step-by-step format to ensure success for anyone-even beginners. More than just a comprehensive cookbook, The Blue Ribbon Country Cookbook contains easy-to-follow techniques and detailed explanations that ensure success. Chapters include every type of food, from soups and stews to pies and tarts, and recipes range from traditional favorites to more contemporary dishes such as Fresh Pear Salad with Ginger Dressing and Rosemary Chicken with Red Raspberry Sauce. What makes this book so special is not just the large number of recipes but also the amount of indispensable information that it contains. An Amazon reviewer explains the book best: "After 16 years of marriage, I was still not able to make some of the dishes my husband's mom did. I never quite got it right. I can now! In her book, Diane taught me the basics of cooking from scratch and now I receive the highest compliment--As Good as Mom's and Grandma's."

This unique and beautiful book was planned for those who love cake decorating and the opportunities it offers for creative self-expression. It explores decorating's long and honored past, then shows how this craft, mastered and perfected, can become as art form. The Wilton Way Volume 2, starts with an exploration of imaginative American techniques that open new horizons to decorators. The special love American decorators have for flowers is the subject of two chapters. The first is devoted to the fifty flowers of the fifty states-many never before achieved in icing. The second is given to the rose-best loved flower of every decorator in the world. 23 varieties and how to pipe them are shown. Wild roses, tea roses, "old" roses, even reproductions of roses that grew in Marie Antoinette's garden. Each is displayed on a beautiful cake.

“An absolute game changer in the industry of cake art . . . hugely aspirational yet completely approachable . . . Bravo!” (Chef Duff Goldman from Ace of Cakes). This essential guide demonstrates more than fifty innovative techniques—via easy-to-follow step-by-step photographic tutorials—and includes over forty stunning cake designs to create at home, from simple cupcakes to three-tiered wonders. Valeri and Christina start by showing you how to perfect a basic buttercream recipe and how to pipe simple textures, patterns, and an array of flowers. They then demonstrate how to create a myriad of creative effects using diverse techniques such as stamping, stenciling, palette knife painting, and much more. “I look forward to learning all the skills that I, as an artist in rolled fondant, have only the most rudimentary grasp of. Not since Cakewalk by Margaret Braun have I been this excited about a cake book.” —Chef Duff Goldman from Ace of Cakes “The authors’ examples are inspirational and a demonstration of what is possible if you ‘put your whole heart into it.’ Overall, Valeriano and Ong have created a book full of inspiration and encouragement that re-energizes the use of buttercream in modern cake design.” —Sonya Hong of American Cake Decorating “Fascinating techniques . . . lovely ideas.” —Lindy Smith, author of The Contemporary Cake Decorating Bible