Colette's Christmas by Colette Peters (1999, Paperback)

"Spectacular holiday cookies, cakes, pies, and other edible art."

This book was too beautiful to pass up, though I instinctively knew a lot of the projects would be too hard for me, an amateur cake decorator.

Even if I never turn out to be skillful enough to master one of these forty-five cake projects, I still love looking through the stunning photographs. Collette Peters is a true artist, with a vivid imagination and elegant, creative designs.

Each project comes with a good deal of templates you can photocopy and enlarge. This is in contrast to many other cake decorating books I own which only give you a few templates.

The projects include beautifully frosted poinsettia cookies, mint meringues shaped like Christmast trees, Poinsettia Diamonds, cookies shaped and painted to look like stockings as they hang before a fire, Raggedy Ann and Andy marionette cookies, Santa marionette cookies, a charming Swiss Chalet gingerbread house, gorgeous edible cookie gift boxes, a stunning replica of the Brooklyn home Collette lives in, a chocolate pumpkin pie wreath, stained glass cakes, a Christmas gazebo cake, an intricate Christmas quilt cake, a cake made to look like a pile of Christmas presents, chocolate almond pine cone wreath, and amazingly stunning molded sugar Christmas ornaments.

The one drawback to this otherwise fabulous book is the lack of step-by-step photos that help me so much when trying to replicate recipes. The directions are clear, but I really like my other books' tiny photos showing the steps along the way and the cakes at different stages.

Because of the skill needed to complete these cakes, I recommend this book only for skillfull decorators, or for people who clearly want it for fun looking through or as a coffee table book.