Happy holidays everyone! I hope whatever you have been celebrating has been lovely, and if you are not celebrating then I hope you are having a relaxing season. I celebrate Hanukkah, which happened quite early this year, but I also celebrate Christmas with my partner & his family. This means that during my breaks from school right now (eternal student am I), we are visiting with family to celebrate the holidays. My partner’s mom loves to bake, and I was able to get quite a few new cookbooks from NetGalley recently, so we decided to try a bunch of recipes for our family holiday get-together. Thank you to NetGalley, Shepard Publications, Kingston Imperial, and Mariner Books for all these cookbooks – we had a lot of fun using them!
The Cookie Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum (Mariner Books)
Release Date 1 November 2022
This was the easiest to read cookbook I think I have ever read, and every dessert we made from it was delicious. We made 4 different treats: a non-bake bourbon ball, a “Christmas wreath” treat, Cloud 9 cookies, and peanut butter and chocolate chip shortbread. All of them came out delicious and nothing was too difficult to make, or even acquire the ingredients for (which hasn’t always been the case with some of the cookbooks I have had). I didn’t think it would be that easy to make shortbread, but I was so pleasantly surprised! Some of the instructions felt a bit overly complicated/specific, but everything came out delicious, so I am guessing there is a reason for it all. I do look forward to trying out more recipes and maybe even modifying them here and there to make them my own. Warning: the bourbon balls are no-bake, so the alcohol is potent; people were definitely feeling the effects as they kept eating them but they were enjoyed – the people eating them described them as feeling warm, which is fun since they were a cold treat. Highly recommend this with a warm beverage (or more bourbon!)
Can I Mix You a Drink? by T-Pain and Maxwell Britten (Kingston Imperial)
Release Date 2 November 2021
I had requested this book because “Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin’)” by T-Pain was a constant high school jam when it came out in 2007, and now that I am well on the legal side of 21, I thought it would be a lot of fun to make some fancy alcoholic drinks created by a rapper of my youth. Full disclosure – I pretty much never drink, so this turned into a group affair with our family Christmas get-together being the drinking event. We made the drink called All I Do Is Win, which is a bourbon-based drink, but I feel like it could have been easily adapted to other alcohols. The instructions for making this drink were clear enough, but I am sure it would have been easier to understand if you are used to reading alcoholic drink recipes. Out of the 5 of us, 3 people really liked it and the other 2 of us were more indifferent (we didn’t dislike it, but we weren’t over the moon with it). My favorite description of this drink was that it tastes the way Bed, Bath and Beyond smells like it would taste. It is filled with citrus, so it makes sense, but it was so funny. There are quite a few other drinks that look good and so we are going to try and make them in the future. Bonus – the little blurbs T-Pain writes in-between the drink recipes are fun to read, the photography is gorgeous, and overall it’s a great coffee table book regardless of whether you drink or not.
Smart Sourdough by Mark Shepard (Shepard Publications)
Release Date 15 September 2021
Making bread is always an interesting endeavor, and sourdough has a reputation for being the most difficult. Since Sourdough is one of my partner’s favorite types of bread, if not his actual favorite, it only made sense to try out a sourdough cookbook where we didn’t need to worry about a starter and there is not supposed to be any waste. We busted out his mom’s trusty instant pot, threw together some makeshift radiant heating tools as described by the book, and got to work on the 18-hour process. End result? We had bread! Was it sourdough? I mean I guess technically yes, we made it from the sourdough book, and it had some tang to it. Did it taste like what I thought it would and be a somewhat sour squishy bread? Nope. It was a very dense loaf with a tight crumb, but it was very squishy & soft still – a good bread overall! This book was not incredibly difficult to use but it also wasn’t the most user friendly of all cookbooks. I like cookbooks where I can open to a recipe and find exactly what I need to know there on that page, with maybe a glance here or there for notes on something that was referenced previously, or tips/tricks on how to make something better. This is not one of those books. The first part of this book is just explaining the myths behind sourdough bread (super cool!), all the right tools of the trade, and some baseline info about using his book. Basically, the majority of the beginning of the book is very technical information that almost made me feel like if I wasn’t following this to a T then I would mess it up, and I just don’t like cooking that way. My partner’s mom is a pretty good baker and even she was struggling with the format of the book. But to be clear, the bread turned out good and we fully intend to try other recipes/versions of this, but this is not for the beginner baker, that’s for sure. This is more of a technical book about bread, for those advanced beadmakers, but I still enjoyed getting to read this book (and eat the bread we made!).
