Amirah Kassem's New Cookbook Will Help You Bake Super-Trendy Cakes

In April, Amirah Kassem—owner and founder of New York City's Flour Shop—will officially launch her first cookbook, The Power of Sprinkles: A Cake Book by the Founder of Flour Shop, which is a bright, colorful compilation of the Instagram-worthy cakes she's known for. In addition to cakes for all occasions, there's frosting tips, a guide to using color and dyes, a section on working with chocolate, and of course, plenty of sprinkles—including instructions for making her signature "Rainbow Explosion Cake." Said cake has six different colored layers, an outside crusted with tiny rainbow sprinkles, and in the middle, a surprise avalanche of even more sprinkles that pour out when you make a slice. (Seth Meyers tried to decorate this cake, to hilarious results.) Ultimately, Kassem told Food & Wine she wants this book to be fun and easy to follow, and to encourage people to get creative in the kitchen.

"As a child, I found a lot of baking books to be a little intimidating with all the terms and steps but, really, it's just cake! And we should all be able to relate to our favorite childhood memories of birthday cake," Kassem told Food & Wine. "If you can master one cake recipe from my book, you can bake a different cake for every celebration and holiday."

There are 29 different cake designs total, based off, as Kassem notes, one master recipe—Bonilla Vanilla cake, which was inspired by and named after Kassem's mother. (Kassem grew up in northern Mexico, and she wrote on the recipe page that she prefers Mexican vanilla because "it tastes like home.")

To fill the book, she went through her Instagram and listed her signature cakes—the total ended up being two books-worth, so she narrowed it down to her favorites. "Spooooky" cakes for Halloween made the final cut, as did "Cara the Unicorn," Kassem's ultimate favorite cake in the book and "Instagram's most memorable trend of 2017." But, as we're a food publication, we naturally gravitated toward all the cake designs that look like different meals: cheeseburgers, bowls of ice cream, pizza. Even sushi—Kassem says cakes that look like food are also some of her favorites, because she finds them funny, especially when they look realistic. We've rounded up 10 of our favorites that you can check out below, and make sure you order your own copy of The Power of Sprinkles to check out the rest.

Cheeseburger

Cereal

Chinese Takeout

Avocado Toast

Popcorn

Ice Cream

Baba Pancakes

Spaghetti

Pizza

Sweet Sushi