Ben-Ishay Melissa - Cakes by Melissa life is what you bake it: 120+ recipes for cakes, icings, fillings, and toppings for endless flavor combinations from the creative force behind Baked by Melissa

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Australia HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd. Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia www.harpercollins.com.au Canada HarperCollins Canada 2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor Toronto, ON M4W 1A8, Canada www.harpercollins.ca New Zealand HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive Rosedale 0632 Auckland, New Zealand www.harpercollins.co.nz United Kingdom HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF, UK www.harpercollins.co.uk United States HarperCollins Publishers Inc. 195 Broadway New York, NY 10007 www.harpercollins.com MELISSA BEN-ISHAY found fulfillment pursuing her lifelong passion for baking after losing her job in advertising. She is the cofounder, president, and chief product officer of Baked by Melissa, which is famous for its bite-size cupcakes.

The company has multiple stores in the New York metropolitan area and ships its products nationwide. Melissa lives in Hoboken, New Jersey, with her husband and daughter. Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa Cover photographs by Ashley Sears BAKED BY MELISSA and CAKES BY MELISSA are licensed trademarks of Baked by Melissa, LLC CAKES BY MELISSA. Copyright 2017 by Baked by Melissa, LLC. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. FIRST EDITION Photography by Ashley Sears ISBN 978-0-0 6-268127-0 EPub Edition October 2017 ISBN 978-0-06-274053-3 FOR SCOTTIE.You can do anything...

When I was in elementary school, my father would drive me to school. It wasnt a long drive, maybe five minutes, but every day in the car he would give me the same speech: Youre amazing, you can do anything that you set your mind to, today is going to be the best day. Every day, word for word, the same speech. As I got older, I would mouth the words along with him and always say, Oh Dad, come on! Both of my parents encouraged my brother, Brian, and me in every thing we did.

If I scribbled on a piece of paper, my mother would say, Oh my god, its so beautiful! Thats just the type of parents they werethey always surrounded me with love, motivation, and confidence. Its so important to have that unconditional support in lifeand in baking. In fact, I was just as empowered in the kitchen as I was in all other aspects of life. I get asked all the time whether I had an Easy-Bake Oven as a child. I did not. Why would I have an Easy-Bake Oven when I was allowed to use the real oven? My grandmothers provided my earliest inspiration and motivation when it came to cooking and baking.

My grandma Annie, my dads mom, was an amazing cook and baker. She always made it look so easy. (See the recipe for her .) My moms mom, Sylvia, cooked all the time, although she wasnt necessarily the best at it. That didnt matter. She was the most loving human Ive ever met and on weekends, when we visited her vacation bungalow in the Catskills, she let me make the salad. I may have been only four or five years old, but she let me use a knife.

Its not always about sweets for meeven today, one of my favorite things to make is a really good salad. I find the chopping very therapeutic and think of my grandma Sylvia every time. My mom, like her mother, let me take charge in the kitchen. When I was growing up in northern New Jersey, we sat down together as a family for dinner every single night of the weekespecially on Friday nights for Shabbat. The dessert was just as important as the dinner. I started baking by my mothers side at a very young age.

My father is a very creative baker, and we baked together all the time as well. But Mom would let me do it allcrack the eggs, mix everything togethereven though I was so small I had to stand on a chair to reach the counter. Thats empowerment, and she, more than anyone, empowered me just as Grandma Sylvia did for her. With this book, I want to empower you the way my family has empowered me. Its set up a little differently from other cookbooks: In Lets Get Caked, youll find loads of inspirational photos of finished cakes in all shapes and sizes and lots of different flavor combinationswith complete instructions on how to concoct them. These are sprinkled among more than a hundred recipes that give you all the information you need to create these cakesand more.

Its up to you to mix and match the cake batters, fillings, icings, and toppings to create the finished cake you want. Youll find , but I want you to think of the recipes as your crayon boxand I encourage you to color outside the lines.

I love cake. I have always loved cake. I get my sweet tooth from my dad, and as a kid, I loved dessert and snacks more than anything. Id always have a snack when I came home from school and it often involved Oreo cookies.

Id take a glass of milk, put the Oreos in the milk, and anchor them down with my spoonthen Id wait just the right amount of time for them to get soggy and delicious and eat them with the spoon. As I got older I learned that if you microwaved the milkoh my godthat was even better! Oreos, Chips Ahoy! cookies, and Entenmanns were what I lived on as a kid. Theres nothing better than those chewy little Entenmanns chocolate chip cookies! I still could eat the whole box. Today, the best part of my job is thinking up flavor combinationsconcoctions, as I like to call them, are where my genius lies. Im not a culinary expertand I did not go to culinary schoolbut I know what I love to eat and apparently I know what other people love to eat, too. I can easily trace the variety of Baked by Melissa flavor and ingredient combinations back to my days in high school.

We would go to my best friend Jens house after school (her dad owns a kosher supermarket and a bunch of bagel stores, so they always had the best food) and I would make up all these crazy combos. Jen recently posted a photo on Facebook from 2005 and its me, eating a bagel topped with peanut butter, Fluff, Nutella, and maple syrup. This is what we did at the end of pretty much every day of high schoolwed come home and relax, and then Id concoct the most delicious munchies. I see baking as arts and crafts, but you get to eat your project. I used to make scrapbooks and decorate picture frames for my friends. I love to create gifts and I think thats where baking fits in for me.

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