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Posts Tagged ‘Desserts’

The Classic Carrot Cookbook: Cake Wrecks Edition

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 [...]

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 [...]

Today’s Country Cooking: Rhubarb Rhubarb Rhubarb

strawberry-rhubarb pie
Last Saturday I finally made it to the neighborhood Greenmarket, its third week of operation. I had good but annoying reasons for missing the first two and I was determined not to miss this one. I knew it was too early for tomatoes, but I was delighted to see there are still plenty of [...]

You Deserve Dessert! Don’t Mind If I Do

cream cheese brownies
Yesterday afternoon I felt like baking. I’m not sure why; it was close to 80 degrees out and muggy as anything. But I wanted to make goodies to take to work, and I had some cream cheese that I’d meant to use for cupcake frosting but I didn’t get to make the cupcakes [...]

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, [...]

Recipes for a New Majority: Pies, Potluck and Politics

Kentucky pie
It’s been 14 years since Recipes for a New Majority: Cooking From All Your Favorite Democrats was published, so I can’t remember for certain, but I think I helped proofread it. Recipes for a New Majority is a compilation assembled by the Democratic Party of Oregon, and Scott and I were friends with one [...]