Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book is beautifully done, exciting to page through and has large, seemingly easy to follow steps. My daughter loves helping in the kitchen and immediately upon receiving this she wanted to try and make a whole bunch of things. Our first recipe was the mini fruit pies. However, that's where things went a bit askew: right away I noticed the recipe called for two apples. It never mentions peeling or chopping the apples for the pies anywhere. To follow the directions exactly would be to have two whole apples thrown into a bowl with the rest of the filling... Obviously we could deduce they ought to be chopped, but for a kids book that is supposed to be all about learning to follow directions, it seems glaringly obvious that this was not specified anywhere. Next we noticed that the ingredients list calls for two tbs of sugar for the crust, but in the instructions you are told to add in "1/3 of a cup of the sugar". I had to guess at which amount was correct. Likewise, the step for mixing the filling asks you to combine the fruit, sugar and almonds together in a bowl, and then two steps later tells you to sprinkle the almonds that you previously mixed with the fruit filling onto the top of the crust before adding the filling. Nowhere are you told to reserve extra almonds, or how much. Lots of weird inconsistencies like this made the short, simple recipe very confusing. Luckily, I bake a lot, so we ended up with a lovely set of little pies that were delicious, but this book needs some more careful editing. A cookbook for children should not have steps and ingredient amounts contradicting each other in a recipe that only has 4 or 5 steps to it. We'll keep going and see how the rest of these turn out!