I was first introduced to the Cake Mix Doctor books a couple of years ago from one of my knitting group friends.  She made this wonderful Apple Cider Cake and brought it to one of our meetings.  It was so good she sent me the recipe and told me the book it came from.

I usually check the library for any books I am interested in and did so with this book.  To my delight they had 3 different titles of the cake doctor books so I checked them all out.  My local library allows you to check books out for 3 weeks and renew, if no one has requested it, for another 3 weeks so that was more than enough time to try out various cakes in the books and decide I would like to own at least one, if not 2 of the titles.

The titles I own are the original Cake Mix Doctor, copyright 1999, and the Chocolate Cake Mix Doctor, copyright 2001.  The original title I received as a gift a couple of years ago for Christmas.  I just recently bought the Chocolate version at my local Half Price Books for only $5.99.  My oldest son and I went there a couple weeks ago to trade in some books and DVD’s – after my DVD organizing we had some to get rid of.

The Cake Mix Doctor books have a variety of different types and styles of cakes to bake.  All of the directions are easy to read and follow and lots of other helpful baking tips and ideas are offered throughout the book.  All of the recipes start with a basic cake mix but lots of other ingredients are added to produce rich and delicious cakes.  These cakes are not made from scratch cakes.

I was never one before to bake tube cakes, I usually stuck with the 13 x 9 or round cakes.  These books have some awesome tube cake recipes and have inspired me to bake a lot more of this style cake and they are so easy!  I made this one in the photo below for my birthday yesterday.

It is a chocolate pound cake that uses cream cheese in the recipe.  It is very good.  I had made some homemade hot fudge sauce, a recipe I found on pinterest, that was so good and went perfectly with this cake as a topping.  My sons loved it!  The hot fudge sauce recipe was from a blog called Chocolate, Chocloate and more.

Another recipe I recently tried from the Chocolate book is the Hello Dolly Bars.  These are made with a cake mix and are just wonderful.  Very easy to make, too.  They do require a few ingredients but are a cinch to throw together and bake in about 25 to 30 minutes.  The perfect cake-bar treat for my hungry kids.

I hope you enjoyed this review of the books and a couple of the recipes.  I have tried many more and they are all delicious.  The ones mentioned above are the ones I have most recently made.  Subscribe via RSS feed or through bloglovin for future book and recipe reviews.