I am new to cake decorating. I have been baking cake from cake box recipes and I am ready to learn new recipes from scratch such as vanilla, chocolate or red velvet. I also want to learn different frosting recipes. Can someone recommend good books on how to learn these?

I would most certainly recommend "The Cake Bible" by Rose Levy Beranbaum. So many amazing recipes, tips, diagrams etc. It's old school baking done incredibly beautifully.

Enjoy!

Rose also has a new book, Rose's Heavenly Cakes.

I have The Cake Bible, and like it a lot. My current favorite book though is Bakewise by Shirley Corriher. I absolutely love the recipes in this book. They are SOOOO delicious. Plus, the book also explains what different ingredients do during baking, which I like.

I recently bought "Rose's Heavenly Cakes." I have done only one recipe from it, a white cake. It was delicious!! I used to have "The Cake Bible." I can't find it, and I am really bummed. Both books are good. Now I what to try the Bakewise book someone mentioned.

The Cake Bible. There are good recipes for both cakes and icings. The good thing about this book is she explains why these recipes work. I helped me understand alot about how and why recipes work the way they do.

I adore Sylvia Weinstock's books. My family and friends love her recipes, especially the yellow cake and her buttercream icing.

I don't have the Cake Bible, but I keep seeing positive reviews about it, as you can even see here.

Have fun!!!

The Well Decorated Cake by Toba Garrett

Perfect Cakes by Nick Maglieri is a great compendium of many many easy to follow cake recipes.

Dorie Greenspan's book is a crazy good book for learning all things bake-able. She has written books with Pierre Herme a world renowned French pastry chef--she translates his methods for us to easily follow and the results! Fantastique!

Plus Dorie herself will answer questions and there's a whole big gigantic thread on egullet specifically about her book. I got this book for my kidlette, the red headed girl. This book gives a tremendous amount of wisom and therefore imparts some confidence to the new and the seasoned baker.

Rose's first book, the cake bible, is not one I would recommend to a newby for several reasons.

One is that the directions for one recipe are in three different places--I don't mean the chart of different weights and measures, that's actually cool--I mean the directions--that's frustrating to have to go looking and you need to basically re-write it in order to follow it efficiently.

The other is her cake recipes are known to be finicky--it's very easy to blow it and then they're dry and you feel unsuccessful. That's been a factor with those cake recipes in her bible book. Her icings are considered good stuff.

Yes Rose has a lot of theory but some of it is kinda weird theory.

I use Sylvia Weinstock's recipe for my white cake--she calls it her yellow cake--I like the old one--not the new one with the milk--it can be googled--I just leave out two of the egg yolks.

The recipe for Perfect Chocolate cake recipe for chocolate cake found on the Hershey can or you can google it too.

Doubleday Wedding cake recipe for yellow cake:

6 cups sifted all purpose flour
2 tablespoons baking powder
2 teaspoons salt
2 cups milk at room temperature
2 teaspoons vanilla
1 # butter or margarine or 1 1/3 cups margarine with 2/3 cups vegetable shortening
(the margarine is not vegetable spread)
4 cups sugar
8 eggs at room temperature
2 teaspoons lemon extract
2 tablespoons finely grated lemon rind (optional)

Preheat oven to 325. Sift flour with baking powder and salt and set aside. Combine milk and vanilla and set aside.
Cream butter until light, add sugar gradually, continue to cream until fluffy.
Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.
Mix in lemon extract (and rind).
Add dry ingredients alternately with milk beginning and ending with the dry and adding about one sixth of the total at a time.
Beat just until smooth.
Spoon into 1 ungreased 13" and 1 ungreased 7" pan lined on the bottom with wax or parchment paper filling no more than half full - this is a high-rising batter.
Bake larger layer 60-65 mins until it pulls from the sides of the pan and is springy to the touch.
Cool upright in pan on wire rack 10 mins then loosen and invert on rack peel off paper turn right side up and cool thoroughly.
If you make 3 batches you get two 13", two 7" and two 10 " layers.
Make cupcakes with any leftover batter.

>>>This is from The New Doubleday Cookbook 1975.

Real good cake. And this recipe is not real fussy - can be halved. Excellent.

Key to making a good cake from a recipe is to make it look like a cake mix as you mix it. Get your emulsions, your mixtures nice and smooth--fluffly some of them.

Watch your bake time carefully and check results.

Thank you all for your suggestions./ i will be doing my research on these books. thanks