Get Healthy 4 All

Cake! I love cake. Birthday cakes, wedding cakes, picnic cupcakes… it’s always a slightly better event if there’s cake around. I’ve made a few myself for friends’ parties over the years, but typically only the really simple kind where you get a pre-mixed bag of stuff from the grocery store, add water, and bake it in a tin according to the recipes on the box. The basic cakes that only really come in white, yellow, and chocolate, you know? I still love them and I’m always inappropriately proud of them when I’ve made them and other people enjoy them, but I do have to admit that the thought of being a bit more of an expert in the art of cake-crafting does appeal to me if I can figure out an easy way to do it.

 

See, the appeal of making cake with the old grocery store kits, to me, is that cakes are quick and easy desserts… it’s not that they’re ready to eat in just a few minutes or anything, but you don’t have to spend much time preparing them before simply waiting for the oven to do it’s magic. So I’m basically only looking for easy recipes, and the internet has a bunch to choose from. I liked the look and feel of the website for Keiko’s cake recipes, one of many recipe sites on the internet offering a wide variety of cake recipes for the layman baker. I decided to throw down some money and see what the members’ area had to offer, and figured I’d tell all you nice people so you could decide if it was worth it for yourselves. Stick around for my Keiko’s cake review.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What’s in Keiko’s Cakes?

 

The mysterious Keiko, pastry master extraordinaire, has set up a clean looking and simply designed website in Keiko’s cake recipes (Follow Keiko on her facebook page). The first thing you see upon logging in is a plain white page with links to recipes for various cakes along the left-hand side, appearing in reverse order from when they were posted so as to be periodically updated with new cakes to try. Browsing through the recipes yields easy cupcake recipes, a simple chocolate cake recipe, a guide to raspberry mousse cake, and a generally impressive variety of other cake pastries and more exotic cakes with foreign-sounding names and made of fruits and other ingredients that I didn’t even know were involved in cakes at any point. It also includes a forum page where members of Keiko’s cake recipes can compare notes and share their own concoctions, the most recent forum posts being displayed on the front page beside the recipes.

 

The main focus of Keiko’s cake recipes, though, is the unintuitively named “Gallery” tab, inside of which is a complete listing of all of the recipes that have been uploaded to the site, sorted by date and marked with large pictures of the finished product so that you can browse by sight for something that looks good. The entries are the same as the ones listed on the front page, except instead of just the most recent ten or so the entire collection is available here for perusal.

 

Clicking on one of the cake recipes takes you to that recipe’s individual page, which has links to a Keikos cake pdf recipe that you can download that goes into much more detail about the recipe itself and includes pictures of every step in the process, including the ingredients, how they should look when mixed, the proper tools to use for mixing them, what the cake should look like at every step in process, etc. The individual recipe page also has a video of the whole process for direct imitation that shows every major step in the making of the cake, though not quite in real time.

 

There’s also a shop with the option to purchase additional cake collections or video lessons on skills like measuring ingredients and decorating your cakes, though for the purposes of this review I haven’t purchased those yet.

 

What Keiko’s Cake Recipes Has Going For It

 

I’m actually very impressed by the level of detail that you get when you surf onto one of the individual recipe pages of Keiko’s Cake Recipes. While I went to the first example I could find expecting just an easy chocolate cake recipe, I was quite pleasantly surprised to find an actual video of the entire process and an in-depth guide with pictures of every step. It goes well beyond a simple recipe collection, and Keiko seems to have spent a really impressive, even possibly excessive, amount of time on every recipe making sure that the customer will be able to reproduce it. While I initially had doubts about the price for what I assumed would just amount to an online recipe book, I can definitely see where the money goes and feel quite a bit more confident in my ability to reproduce Keiko’s cake recipes than recipes without the accompanying media. There’s also a tie-in with Gaia Online, if you’ve ever played it, as the Keiko’s cake Gaia avatar is evidently a big seller in the virtual item market. Myself, I don’t know much anything about it, but if that’s your bag, it seems pretty popular.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What Keiko’s Cake Recipes Lacks

 

The several different tiers of membership are a little confusing, and it’s a little disappointing to not have access to all of the cakes on the site with a basic membership. There are still dozens if not hundreds of cakes to choose from at the basic level, but now that I’ve been convinced of the reproducibility of Keiko’s cake recipes, I kind of want to try more than I have access to. The videos are also perhaps longer than they need to be; while being thorough is good, I wound up skipping a lot of the videos I watched because I already knew that step. For a beginner, this is probably good, but for someone who already knows how to bake, it’s more detail than necessary.

 

How Does Keiko’s Compare With Other Online Cake Recipes?

 

I’ve tried her easy cupcake recipes and the simple chocolate cake recipe in depth, and they came out just as good as any other cupcakes or chocolate cake I’ve ever tried. Many of the more exotic cakes like the raspberry mousse cake or the red opera cake I’ve never tried in any capacity before, so I wouldn’t be confident comparing them to other recipes for the same cakes, but given the ones that I am familiar with I’m quite confident in the recipes themselves. What I DO feel confident comparing is the amount of information available on the site, and Keiko’s Cake Recipes stands out for its in-depth coverage of every individual cake recipe. Finding written instructions for quick and easy desserts isn’t that rare, but finding videos of the whole process and pages-long recipes with pictures is something else entirely, and I find it both very impressive and very unique, at least in my own searches thus far.

 

Who’d Benefit The Most From Keiko’s?

 

I’d say Keiko’s Cake Recipes is marketed mostly towards anybody who enjoys cooking and likes cake, but it’s especially suited for people with a taste for a variety of different cakes and who would like to push their own culinary skills past the basic birthday cake mixes available at the supermarket, for which there’s really no recipe necessary. It probably wouldn’t be worth the time for somebody who only wants to eat cake once or twice a year or for somebody who doesn’t like baking for friends or family, though. But otherwise, I’d say it could be a huge help.

 

So should you try it?

 

I’m pretty into it, honestly. I’m much more confident in my ability to emulate Keiko’s cake recipes than any other cake recipe that doesn’t have an accompanying video, and given the variety of cakes, this will keep me entertained for a really long time. And, hopefully, it will make me look good at the next potluck or dinner party I attend. It’s not perfect, and it does have those problems that I mentioned above, so I don’t mean to gush, but I was actually quite pleasantly surprised with all that Keiko’s Cake Recipes has to offer, so I would rather enthusiastically recommend it if you’re the cake-baking type.