Your iPhone may not be able to make you toast in the morning, but it can assist in your other culinary activities, thanks to the many cookbooks available on the App Store. One of the most popular to date is BigOven 160,000 Recipes. It gives you access to the database of largely user-submitted recipes available on BigOven.com.

However, whenever you're downloading an app, you're really looking for some kind of functionality or usability you couldn't get simply by using the iPhone's standard applications. Unfortunately, BigOven 160,000 Recipes doesn't go this far.

It does give you access to, as the title suggests, more than 160,000 recipes and you can search through these using the basic text entry bar you're presented with as you launch the app. Trying to be a bit too clever for its own good, there's no differentiation between search types, even though you can search for title keywords, ingredients or certain keywords.

Try to search for a certain ingredient and you could as easily find yourself stumbling upon the history of, say, Parmesan cheese as the directions of how to make a parmesan-topped lasagne.

The core issue we have with BigOven 160,000 Recipes is that it doesn't really prove itself as an app. All it really offers is a tap-friendly way to get onto the BigOven.com website. Don't get us wrong, we've got nothing against BigOven.com. In fact, it's a useful resource, but a jumped-up link to it doesn't make for a decent app.

Although it lets you label recipes as one of your favourites, or as something you'd like to cook up soon, this only lets you link it to your online profile rather than something specific to the app. So, if you were to return to BigOven 160,000 Recipes without a network connection, they aren't stored within the app, making them pretty useless in a variety of situations.

Even if you can always get a network connection when in need of a recipe or two, you might as well just surf over to the BigOven.com website, since the interface is just about the same when using the built-in Safari browser. You can't, for example, trim down your recipe selection by gradually adding-in or removing the ingredients you have at your disposal.

You can add multiple ingredients into your searches, but the simple text bar entry is a lot less accessible and user-friendly than the more dynamic strategies we've seen employed in other recipe apps.

The BigOven.com resource isn't something to be sneered at, even though there are obviously going to be some quality control issues when dealing with such an expansive user-generated database of recipes. However, this app doesn't significantly add to the experience of just browsing the site, apart from bringing the pretty pointless feature of presenting you with a random recipe when you shake the device.