The round was led by Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments and included participation from Vocap Ventures, Zelkova Ventures and Gary Vaynerchuk. Lerer Ventures, 15 Angels and investor Joanne Wilson, who had also participated in the company’s $750,000 seed round in 2010, contributed to this round as well.

Betabeat actually reported the news about the funding round back in January when a Series D form was filed with the SEC.

On the Food52 blog, Hesser and Stubbs write about their plans for the funding:

“Over the next year, we’ll be improving our user experience for all mobile devices. We have a great new shop, unlike any other, in the works. And we’ll be expanding our publishing platform through an innovative partnership with Random House, Inc., which publishes renowned food writers Ina Garten, Alice Waters, and Yotam Ottolenghi.”

Food52 has already published two cookbooks with HarperCollins’ William Morrow. Hesser said that the company will have more to share about its new publishing plans soon.

It launched what can only be described as digital interactive coffee table recipe book centered on the theme of today’s hippest dessert: cupcakes. The iPad app (available for $2.99 in the iTunes App Store) is stocked with lush interactive photographs and video, designed to entice the food fetishist in us all, and while it’s full of recipes and instructive lessons, it’s an easy app to flip through, letting you swipe between one tantalizing cupcake image to the next – just like the bound food-porn tomes that grace end tables and bookstore cookbook displays around the world.

The app is slick, which immediately raises my suspicions. In general, pretty cookbooks are a waste of money – the quantity and quality of photographs in cookbooks are usually in inverse proportion to the usefulness of the recipes they illustrate. But Bob Madden, GM and SVP of online brands for Food Network and The Cooking Channel, said his team designed the app to be a useful kitchen aid as well as eye candy. FN filled the app with instructional videos demonstrating baking and frosting techniques and it tested every recipe in FN’s San Francisco New York City test kitchens.

In addition, FN isn’t just repurposing recipes and videos from its TV shows and website for the app. It contains some cupcake ideas from Alton Brown and other network personalities, and it features a section of recipes from its FN program “Cupcake Wars,” but most of its content is original. The photos and videos were shot and the recipes collected, refined and compiled specifically for the app, Madden said.

So is Food Network, which is jointly owned by Scripps Networks Interactive and the Tribune Company, building up a side business in digital cookbook publishing? Not exactly, Madden said. The app isn’t free and it does contain advertising from Food Network sponsors, but ultimately apps like “Cupcakes” — and even FN’s print cookbook business — are designed to promote the Food Network and Cooking Channel brands. You’ll probably see more efforts like “Cupcakes” to create content that exists apart from its TV programming, Madden said, but FN looks at digital content as way to expand the content available to its core TV fan base as well as create niche or segmented content it can’t offer over its cable channels.

I’ll admit, I’m not much of a baker and my tolerance for cutesy cupcakes is low, but this app is impressive. It utilizes the new capabilities of the tablet format well. For instance there’s a frosting section that let’s you scroll through a palette of different icing colors. You tap on a frosting color and a screen pops up detailing the exact proportion of colored gels necessary to reproduce it. We’re starting to see more and more interactive cookbooks designed specifically for the tablet format. Inkling’s digital version of The Professional Chef, Food52′s Holiday Recipe and Survival Guide, and Open Air Publishing’s Mixology are all good examples.

Epicurious plans to partner with other publishers as well, but the program’s initial launch is with 75 Random House cookbooks from across the company’s imprint and includes titles from Bobby Flay, Giada DeLaurentiis and Martha Stewart, among others. Earlier this year, Random House signed up as an Epicurious content partner and made some individual recipes available through the site.

The digital cookbooks range in price from $10.99 to $24.99. Users buy them through the Epicurious website, which has partnered with cookbook community site Tastebook.com to handle the purchasing. Users can import all the recipes in each book directly into their digital recipe boxes (where they can also store recipes from Epicurious’s other content partners, like Gourmet and Bon Appétit). They can access their recipe boxes from the Epicurious iOS apps. The feature will be available for Android by the end of the year. Starting December 21, users will be able to gift e-cookbooks to each other.

The basic version of the Epicurious app is free, but users who want to access their saved recipe box recipes from their mobile devices have to pay $1.99 to add the “Recipe Box Sync” feature.

Users who want to read the digital cookbooks as a whole can click the “Cook from the Book” link included with each recipe, and are automatically brought to the cookbook to page through. This does not seem like the easiest way of reading the digital cookbooks in full, but reading the cookbooks in full isn’t really the point of this partnership, though Epicurious says these versions are “as close to the printed version as you can get.” Random House already sells all of the titles included in the Epicurious partnership as standalone e-books, so users who buy them through this platform presumably want to access their recipes individually.

Still, the process adds another layer of complication to accessing e-books that a user has already bought–and requires the user to read the cookbooks through the Epicurious platform, rather than the e-reading platform where they store any other e-books they own.