We were wrapping up a photo shoot for Food Network Magazine’s Piece of Cake column a while back, and our deputy art director, Marc Davila, said he wanted to take the cake we’d shot to a party that night. If you’ve seen the column, you know that these aren’t ordinary cakes—they’re full-on spectacles: a giant burger, an oversize caramel apple, an ice cream steak with pound cake fries. The cake that Marc planned to take was the one pictured here (see Cheese Wheel Cake for the how-to). When he showed up at the party, his friends were beyond happy. They told him no one had brought cheese and they desperately needed some—how awesome that he had come with a whole wheel! Since then, our food director, Liz Sgroi, has conceived of many other incredible look-alikes, including “guacamole” made of green ice cream in a chocolate-cake molcajete (stone bowl) and a lobster-roll cake made of a split pound cake with ambrosia-like filling.
These fake-out cakes are only a small part of our dessert collection, but when we sat down to put this book together we realized that all the sweets in the magazine have something in common: They’re fun, not frilly. To be honest, they’re desserts that any 5-year-old would love: a cake covered with ice cream cones, a toasted-marshmallow pie, macaroons that taste like a PB&J. Don’t get me wrong: We take desserts seriously around here—we just don’t think they need to be overly complicated.
You’ll see as you flip through that the chefs in Food Network Kitchens don’t use crazy pans or ingredients you can’t find, and they don’t break out a piping bag very often, either. One of the test kitchen’s best dessert ideas of all time is an ice cream sandwich made with nothing but caramel sauce, vanilla ice cream and Ritz crackers. I threw some together for a Fourth of July party instead of my usual elaborate ice cream cake roll, and everyone went nuts. I will now save at least an hour and a half on dessert prep at future summer parties by making these. In other words, they changed my life. I hope you find something in this book that does the same for you.