Stirring Up Fun with Food: Over 115 Simple, Delicious Ways to Be Creative in the Kitchen

As a huge fan of Sarah Michelle Gellar, I had high hopes for this book...but they were quickly dashed.

First- she doesn't show pictures of all of the recipes. I HATE that.

Second- Nearly every dessert recipe in the book starts with a 'boxed cake mix' in the ingredients. Why!!?!?? A lazy unhealthy shortcut.

Third- half of the recipes are not even recipes at all. I mean, she actually tries to pass off heart shaped fruit as a recipe. She says to take watermelon and strawberries and use a heart shaped cookie cutter to cut hearts. Um not a recipe. More like a suggestion.

And last....one of the recipes was so graphic that my 6-year-old son became visibly upset and begged me to rip those two pages out of the book. I obliged because truly it was awful to look at. It was a recipe for sugar cookies where you cut out the shape of a man with his arms up and then you remove his leg and cover the severed limb with red jelly. Then you attach a plastic shark to the red jelly coated severed limb part of the cookie for 'effect!' She even wrote in small print that this recipe is for people with an 'excellent sense of humor.' Ok thanks for the heads up.

Overall, this book was a disappointment. There are maybe 3 or 4 recipes in there that I would actually make and even those aren't anything I haven't already seen all over Pinterest.

The book is well put together and really easy to navigate with some recipes that are new to me and some that are familiar with an added fun twist. I have already picked out a few recipes to try and can't wait to dive into them. Includes easy to follow recipes with pictures. Great cookbook for a beginner like myself. Check it out.

I was really hoping for better and excited to receive this book. However, contents are unoriginal and can be found on any DIY blog. Very disappointed with recipes as well, they are mostly with store bought mixes and again, nothing new or that can't be found on baking websites.

This fantastic and fun cookbook by Michelle Gellar and her hubby Freddie Prince Jr. takes many kitchen classics and standards and puts a twist into them taking boring basics and giving them a punch of liveliness. Things like chicken fingers, boring vegetables, and desserts take an unexpected hard right into the fun zone and bring kids to the table and the kitchen to help out.

The book is organized by month with fun projects from Super Bowl parties to Valentine's Day and Halloween. There are even additional themes, like a Star Wars Day . In short, Buffy’s book is for the anybody cook who wants to bring the kids to the kitchen and get them eating fun foods that they can help create.

Simply, this books slays it on creativity and fun, and is a great addition to the family kitchen.

I was super excited to get this book, but I have to say that excitement quickly turned to disappointment. The recipes are all super simple and a lot of them are completely basic. A recipe for egg in the hole? why waste a page on that? Then there's the flavored maple syrups. Take maple syrup and throw in some berries and then you have flavored syrup. Two pages were used for that recipe and you were told to put your flavored syrup on a few frozen waffles. Corn on a stick and brownies on a stick can be done without a cookbook. I was expected really cute ideas for Halloween and Christmas. For Halloween,there was nothing new and the Christmas recipes were just odd. I have a huge collection of cookbooks and this is one that I just wish I could return. Don't waste your money.

This book is very fun and I love how it's simple recipes and puts a twist on a lot of new things I've tried before. I love how everything is organized in months can't wait to start stirring up fun with food :)

Well put together. Browsed through it, cant wait to try these out!

I LOVE this cookbook, because it is so different from so many of the other cookbooks I have read or own. I love that she goes through the entire year, and for every month, there are a variety of sweet and savory recipes.The pictures are gorgeous. Most are very easy to make, some need a little more prep. But so far, everything I have tried has been a success with my family, even my picky eater son :)

I can't wait to try it out every recipes it looks amazing and super creative.

I'm not the target audience for this book since I'm not currently raising young children, so my indifference to the many recipes for food on sticks and in mason jars is to be expected. I do think a lot of the tiny-size portions would make cute mini-meals for bento boxes, and I like the cheerfulness of the book and all the details about the author's family rituals and routines, as well as the happy family photos. I can believe that Ms. Gellar and her co-author make some of these foods for their families, and I'm guessing they're well-tested recipes. Like another reviewer, I found the shark week photo spread pretty gross, but I was amused by the July intro note about how Ms. Gellar's husband isn't such a big fan of shark week himself. Those family details are charming and feel authentic.

I have a few criticisms. Here's a quote from the introduction to the October chapter:

"Before we leave the house to knock on doors, we allow the kids to pick ten treats from both the treats we baked and special-purchased good-quality chocolates. We label them and stash them in a cupboard. After the kids return with buckets and bags full of candy, they eat the squirreled-away candy and donate what they've collected to the less fortunate."

Now, unless the "less fortunate" she is referring to is a community of pot heads with a wicked case of the munchies, Ms. Gellar just said that her kids are given good quality chocolate and baked food, and the family unloads all the junk food on poor folk (who can't be expected to be discriminating enough to feed their kids healthy food like the rich and privileged).

This unfortunate phrasing was something her editor should have caught. There was another reference to "gifts for the less fortunate" in the December intro, but I think that was honestly meant to be a non-offensive way to say giving charity, and there aren't that many good euphemisms for acts of charity. (Hopefully her kids will also learn that real charity isn't the same thing as unloading low-quality junk you don't want for yourselves.)

That aside, I think the book does what it sets out to do. It shows ways to make food fun for kids, thus tempting them to eat healthier meals. The recipes make some use of cake mixes to promote Ms. Gellar's company, Foodstirs, but not so often that you feel like you've bought a big promotional booklet (and you could probably substitute other mixes if you were so inclined). Taken together with Mr. Prinze's cookbook, it shows a sweet portrait of a happy family engaged in doing family things together in the kitchen, and in this era of broken and disconnected families, that's a nice thing to model and encourage.