Have Your Cake

You can see it in their eyes as they stand before a cake, that look of quiet yearning and hope. They are the kindred souls of cakes, those who delight in moist crumb and the feelings of joy a good cake can bring. They can’t resist a cake recipe and certainly not a cake book like “Bevelyn Blair’s Everyday Cakes” (Hill Street, $22.50).

Blair, whose round picture stamped on the cover is like Betty Crocker’s on a box mix, didn’t bake her first cake until age 23, the book flap says. But, “fortunately for us,”it says, she collected 500 great recipes to share.

If some of those recipes seem a bit familiar, it’s not because you’ve read one too many cake books. Many of the recipes in “Everyday Cakes” are from Blair’s first book, “Country Cakes,” published in the ‘80s. The book’s only clue that it is a revised edition is on the copyright page, where, in small print, it says so. (And why does it say it was originally published in 1984, when the flap says 1986?)

Hmmmm. Assuming the cake kindred do not have the first one, the new book offers plenty. Type is easy to read, recipes look fairly simple and what’s not to like? There are two lemon cheesecakes, not to mention lemon loaf and lemonade cake. A coffeecake chapter includes a sweet potato cake. The peach crumb cake with a bake-ahead crust sounds luscious, though the plum cake looks a bit disappointing with its plum baby food, not fresh plums.

At a time when another cake book is selling briskly (“The Cake Mix Doctor,” see story, Page 4) it would seem worthwhile to glance at this one. Baking a number of the recipes in “Everyday Cakes” really isn’t much more difficult than doctoring a boxed mix. And though the kindred may have recipes that sound similar, they can never have too many.