I watch very little television. Pretty much only NFL football, Fringe, Lost, and cooking shows - - Top Chef, Next Iron Chef, and Ace of Cakes. The new Ace of Cakes book is clearly a labor of love. It's 300 pages detailing the history of Charm City Cakes and the Ace of Cakes show, with everything from photos of Duff's mom and grandmother, diagrams explaining how the cakes are made, a list of the 49 flavors of cake available at the store, and the story of how Duff met Mary Alice. As you can see above, the book is set up like a yearbook with seemingly everyone who works at Charm City Cakes or behind the scenes at Ace of Cakes getting a few pages to share photos and tell anecdotes. It's a great book. You can see a few more interior pages here, and the book is currently 46% off at Amazon.
And a few more reviews:
1. We're lucky enough to have tennis courts on the property where we live, so I've started taking my oldest over there to learn. We've been using ProPenn T.I.P foam balls to play. They're oversized (so he has a better chance of making contact) and relatively soft (so the groin shots he's inflicted on me are painless). The only downside is that they get dirty very fast. Look for them at a Target or similar store near you. They're pretty expensive at Amazon.
2. A Lion Among Men by Gregory Maguire: I'd give Wicked an A, Son of a Witch a B-, and Lion Among Men is so boring that I stopped after 150 pages or so. Wicked is $8 at Amazon.
3. Thursday Next: First Among Sequels by Jasper Ffforde: Another disappointment. The first four Thursday Next novels are terrific. I read about 200 pages in this one before I finally accepted that it wasn't going to get better. But you should definitely try the first four books, which are all available at a discount at Amazon.
