Many of the "specialty" cakes I make have overlapping components. For example, several of the cakes contain the same basic cake, it's the combination of fillings and icings that differentiate them. Also, most of my icings and fillings are just variations on a base recipe. For example, the different flavors of buttercream that I make are all built upon my recpie for IMBC, so they aren't different recipes per se, but alterations/additons to the IMBC recipe.

That being said. Which would you prefer:

Organized by: a section of cake recipes (just the cake part), a section of fillings, a section of icings, etc, then a section where I explain how to put those components together into different specialty cakes

Organized by specialty cake: in which each cake is explained from start to finish, even if that means duplication of recipes?

So, for example, the Chocolate Overload could refer you back to page such and such for the cake, page so and so for the filling, and page this and that for the icing and then go on to explain how to put those together to make the Chocolate Overload. OR it could include the recipes for the cake, filling, and icing and how to put them together. Then, another recipe, that uses the same icing would have that same recipe reprinted under that cake, etc.

Fi you do it by specialty cake, there is no need to duplicate recipes.

Every cookbook I have is like that and when it comes to 'assembling' the cake, it just references the previous recipe, i.e. chocolate cake recipe pg. 28, vanilla icing pg. 38. Now if you have a specialty recipe for a cake (filling, decorations, whatever) then go ahead and include that recipe under that specialty cake. Now for the different variations of the recipe, include a basic SMBC recipe and when you change/alter it, in the instructions say - Start with basic SMBC recipe and not the variations.

Check out your cookbooks or go to the library and see how others do it.

hth

Yeah, I know how most other cookbooks do it. I was just wondering if other bakers preferred a different organization.