Sweet Designs: Bake It, Craft It, Style It

Bake it, Craft it, Style it! Amy Atlas, home baker, crafter, and party planner extraordinaire, shows her readers and fans how to create fabulous sweets tables for adults and kids, combining easy recipes, dressed-up store-bought treats, and craft ideas, to make dessert a fitting grand finale to any gathering. Amy Atlas gained an international following when she introduced the concept of meshing baking and crafting to make beautiful sweets spreads. She has designed tables for Brooke Shields, Electrolux with Kelly Ripa, Gayle King, Martha Stewart Weddings, Mindy Weiss, and O Magazine. Since 2008, hundreds of thousands of readers have flocked to her award-winning blog, Sweet Designs. Now they'll learn how she does it for the first time in her first book filled with brand-new tables, original recipes, do-it-yourself instructions, and dozens of tips and secrets.
Sweet Designs includes 15 chapters filled with more than 100 recipes for every kind of irresistible treat, plus over 75 easy, affordable DIY craft projects to make them even more special. Each chapter features an amazing dessert table that reflects themes Amy's clients most often request: a favorite color, design, flavor, destination, passion, or holiday. Amy tells readers how they can make just one item, mix and match items from different tables, or make the dessert tables as shown.

Each chapter explains how to:

• Bake It: Recipes for making decadent sweets of all kinds, including cakes, cookies, pies, brownies, mousse, truffles, popsicles, ice cream bars, and drinks.
• Craft It: How-to's for creating Amy's signature popcorn cups, candy bar wrappers, paper pinwheels, banners, candy bags, and more, plus simple instructions for accessing her one-of-a-kind patterns and templates on her website.
• Style It: Designer secrets for arranging sweets, choosing patterns, accessorizing a pedestal or serving dish, and mixing textures and colors.
• Shop It: Pick up sweets from the corner store to pair with home-baked desserts and a chapter-by-chapter resource guide for finding the less common ones.
• Display It: Dressed-up serving vessels, backdrops, dessert tags, and other simple display touches to create the whole dessert table or make a single treat stand out.
• Switch It: Creative ways to swap the colors and desserts or platters to better suit your needs, grow them down for the kids, minimize your time with easy-does-it tips, and more.

For every maid of honor who needs to plan an epic bridal shower (and then later the baby shower), every mom who needs to put together a birthday bash her kids will never forget, and every Scrabble aficionado who wants to throw the game-night party to end all game-night parties, Amy serves up that elusive "wow factor" to make every celebration an event to remember.