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Cookbook Project, Books #96 and 97
Sep. 18th, 2009 07:01 pm"Cooking For Your Evil Twin," Ann Wall Frank
I got this book many, many years ago - my senior year in college, actually. I was out in Ohio, interviewing at OSU Vet School, and staying with a friend from high school. We took a field trip to some giant bookstore, the name of which I can't remember, and while browsing around randomly I found it. It's tiny, with a hot pink cover, and is full of delicious-sounding and variously bad-for-you recipes, as well as some pretty witty humor writing.
Alas, while it has followed me from house to house and state to state... I never actually got around to making any of the recipes from it. As usual. Because I am lame and full of good intentions and not so much full of follow-through. Until this project.
There were far too many entertaining recipes to choose from here, and while I wanted to make one of the utterly sinful-sounding desserts that she includes, my choices were as much driven by practicality as anything else. We had a couple heads of broccoli sitting around, courtesy of our local farmer's market (our broccoli, alas, went to flower weeks ago), so I was responsible and made Cheap Thrills Broccoli Bisque.
I'll be honest, I didn't expect anything grand. I mean, it's a palm-sized hot pink paperback novelty/comedy book. I figured the recipes would mostly be jokes. I was wrong. This was surprisingly excellent, and is likely to become a winter standard. And it just makes me all the more determined to make her Women Who Dine With the Wolves Frosted Brownies....
"The Practical Encyclopedia Of Baking,' Martha Day
This is a giant coffee table book of doom. It is big enough to kill small mammals, weighs more than most newborns, and is full of shiny, glossy pictures of various baked goods. It is also battered, worn, and clearly well-loved. The slipcover is shredded, most of the pages are smudged with flour and grease, and, left on its own, it falls open to the recipe for Apple Maple Dumplings, which I have made more times than I can count.
I don't quite remember where it came from. I think I bought it myself, from a Waldenbooks discount table, but it might have been a gift from far enough back that the details have faded. Either way, I've used it plenty - for a long time, it was the only baking book I had, and it has never yet let me down. So when I failed to pick a dessert recipe from the Evil Twin cookbook, I had to look here instead.
Once again, I was saved from a terminal case of option paralysis by ingredient limitations.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
umbran had bought bananas at the store, so I only had to choose from half a dozen banana recipes instead of several hundred cakes, pies, bars, cookies, and other uncategorizable sweets. And while the other choices all looked good, the Banana Lemon Layer Cake sounded interesting enough to win out over everything else.
I had never thought of combining banana and lemon before, and all I can say now is that was a serious shame, because they go together surprisingly well. It helped that the cake was tender and sweet and nearly perfect, and the icing actually had a really good, strong lemon flavor. It was a little stiff and difficult to spread, but other than that, this was an amazing dessert.
Of course, it also brought home to me the fact that, after this project is done, my next mission is going to be to learn how to decorate cakes. I'm tired of delicious desserts with lumpy, uneven icing....
I got this book many, many years ago - my senior year in college, actually. I was out in Ohio, interviewing at OSU Vet School, and staying with a friend from high school. We took a field trip to some giant bookstore, the name of which I can't remember, and while browsing around randomly I found it. It's tiny, with a hot pink cover, and is full of delicious-sounding and variously bad-for-you recipes, as well as some pretty witty humor writing.
Alas, while it has followed me from house to house and state to state... I never actually got around to making any of the recipes from it. As usual. Because I am lame and full of good intentions and not so much full of follow-through. Until this project.
There were far too many entertaining recipes to choose from here, and while I wanted to make one of the utterly sinful-sounding desserts that she includes, my choices were as much driven by practicality as anything else. We had a couple heads of broccoli sitting around, courtesy of our local farmer's market (our broccoli, alas, went to flower weeks ago), so I was responsible and made Cheap Thrills Broccoli Bisque.
I'll be honest, I didn't expect anything grand. I mean, it's a palm-sized hot pink paperback novelty/comedy book. I figured the recipes would mostly be jokes. I was wrong. This was surprisingly excellent, and is likely to become a winter standard. And it just makes me all the more determined to make her Women Who Dine With the Wolves Frosted Brownies....
"The Practical Encyclopedia Of Baking,' Martha Day
This is a giant coffee table book of doom. It is big enough to kill small mammals, weighs more than most newborns, and is full of shiny, glossy pictures of various baked goods. It is also battered, worn, and clearly well-loved. The slipcover is shredded, most of the pages are smudged with flour and grease, and, left on its own, it falls open to the recipe for Apple Maple Dumplings, which I have made more times than I can count.
I don't quite remember where it came from. I think I bought it myself, from a Waldenbooks discount table, but it might have been a gift from far enough back that the details have faded. Either way, I've used it plenty - for a long time, it was the only baking book I had, and it has never yet let me down. So when I failed to pick a dessert recipe from the Evil Twin cookbook, I had to look here instead.
Once again, I was saved from a terminal case of option paralysis by ingredient limitations.
umbran had bought bananas at the store, so I only had to choose from half a dozen banana recipes instead of several hundred cakes, pies, bars, cookies, and other uncategorizable sweets. And while the other choices all looked good, the Banana Lemon Layer Cake sounded interesting enough to win out over everything else.I had never thought of combining banana and lemon before, and all I can say now is that was a serious shame, because they go together surprisingly well. It helped that the cake was tender and sweet and nearly perfect, and the icing actually had a really good, strong lemon flavor. It was a little stiff and difficult to spread, but other than that, this was an amazing dessert.
Of course, it also brought home to me the fact that, after this project is done, my next mission is going to be to learn how to decorate cakes. I'm tired of delicious desserts with lumpy, uneven icing....
