The Clandestine Cake Club – A Year of Cake book

The first book I reviewed on JibberJabberUK was the first Clandestine Cake Club Cookbook back in February 2013. Now just over 2½ years later has come the sequel with The Clandestine Cake Club - A Year of Cake. With the number of groups currently standing at 197 across the world the Clandestine Cake Club has grown and grown in popularity. It seems people can't get enough of baking cake and sharing it together and I'm one of them. The idea of the Clandestine Cake Club is that a date is set for the meeting with a rough location but until a few days before the meeting none of the members know the exact location – that's the clandestine nature of the club.

With many groups holding meetings at once a month a lot of cake recipes are needed and this book is packed with 100 different bakes for you to savour. One of the few rules of the Clandestine Cake Club is that any cake brought to the meeting must be a full cake so no cupcakes, muffins, pies or brownies are allowed. With this mind all the recipes in the book are for large cakes which can be cut up and shared around.

As the title of the book suggests this book is all about cakes throughout the year. It starts off naturally in January with a Greek New Year's cake and goes through the month with a Balkan Christmas cake, Burns Night and finishes off with Australia Day. Inbetween though there are cakes to celebrate other events. On 2^nd January there's an homage for the birthday of the Domestic Goddess herself. Of course in honour of Nigella this is a twist on one of her most famous cakes so this is a Guinness Chocolate and Tia Maria Cake. There's also a Peanut Butter and Caramelised Banana Cake for someone else's birthday. Can you guess who? Why, it's the King himself, Elvis Presley.

Throughout the year all the usual occasions are celebrated with a cake. There's a Creme Egg Nest Cake for Easter and a rather fantastic looking Spiced Pumpkin Cake for Halloween. To finish off the year there's a number of December delights if you don't fancy a traditional fruit Christmas Cake. There's a great variety of flavours and decorations plus different shaped cakes. One gripe I had about the first book was that the index didn't list cakes by their style but here in this one all five Bundt cakes are listed together as are the loaf cakes. I don't want to take credit for this improvement but... Sadly however there seems to be fewer photographs in this book than the last one. I do like to see an image of the finished result to know what I'm aiming for and to entice me to make it. To be fair I know how expensive and time consuming food styling and photography is and at times something has to give.

Would I recommend this book? Absolutely if you're a regular cake baker looking for something different to bake. The recipes are unusual but not completely outlandish. At the moment many sellers have got it for sale for less than £7 will is an absolute bargain. Snap it up while you can or get it on your Christmas list if you can wait that long.

I bought the book myself and just like the first book I can't wait to try out some of the recipes.