sour cream carrot cake
The Classic Carrot Cookbook is a 1982 production of the Arizona Federation of Garden Clubs. It’s plastic-comb bound (orange comb and cover, of course) and set in Courier type that may have been printed from a word processor, but may have been produced on the small-type ball of an IBM Selectric. The [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Cookies and Sweets’
The Classic Carrot Cookbook: Cake Wrecks Edition
The Cake Mix Doctor: Baking Outside the Box
birthday cake cones
If you’ve been reading this blog you’ve probably noticed that I’m kind of a snob about scratch cooking. I don’t think that every kind of processed food out there is an abomination, but I think a lot of them are, and their chief failing is that they provide a lower-quality, less tasty result, [...]
The Twinkies Cookbook: Twinkiehenge
Twinkiehenge
Twinkies are the epitome of processed food: spongy, resilient, wrapped in plastic, with only slightly more flavor than the wrapping, they are globally recognizable and endlessly the same. They couldn’t not be Recipes of the Damned. So when I saw The Twinkies Cookbook in the discount section at Barnes & Noble a couple of years [...]
The New Joys of Jell-O: Joy Is Not the Word I Would Use
ring around the fruit mold
I have never been a fan of Jell-O. I find the texture off-putting, the taste chemical-y and harsh, and the very principle simply wrong. This is probably one reason that I own three Jell-O cookbooks; in fact, it was a Jell-O cookbook that started me down the path to Recipes of [...]
The New Hostess of To-Day: In Which I Rediscover the Joy of Custard Sauce
apple snow, with boiled custard (soft)
The New Hostess of To-Day dates from 1916, so it’s not quite as impenetrable as Miss Leslie’s work but is still chock full of vague directives and alarming ingredients. Pigeon Galantine, for example, though I may just be biased by living in New York and therefore seeing any pigeon recipe [...]
Special Diet Recipes: I Made Dessert With Baby Food
peach parfait
Special Diet Recipes is a 1949 pamphlet of recipes that use baby food — perhaps a predictable approach for the Gerber Products Company. The recipes are recommended for various special diets. Peach parfait fits into a few regimens, including bland diet, soft diet, dental or mechanically soft diet, and liquid diet. So if I [...]
Cooking With Gourmet Grains: Easy Pudding
double chocolate pudding
Cooking With Gourmet Grains is a Recipes of the Damned book, sent to me by Sallyacious with sticky notes calling out some of the most egregious concoctions. The foremost of those is “wheat germ chicken with peaches,” which Sally tags “the reason I bought this book.” It’s basically oven-fried chicken and oven-fried peaches, [...]
McCall’s Cookie Collection: Two New (to Me) Holiday Cookies
coffee-almond lace wafers, glazed fudge drops
This is the third and last Christmas cookie post. I’ve come back to McCall’s Cookie Collection, which I used in June only to realize I’d made that recipe before, and so this time I was careful to choose things I know I’ve never made. From this book or any other, [...]
Martha Stewart Holiday Cookies: The Great Caramel Spill of 2009
golden popcorn squares
The really crazy part of this isn’t that I tried out a caramel sauce recipe that nearly led to disaster. The really crazy part is that I almost made fortune cookies in addition to the other holiday sweets.
Martha Stewart Holiday Cookies is another of those special-issue magazines, this one from 2001 (several years [...]
