But What Does It Look Like?!
August 26, 2008
Buying cookbooks (even though my shelf is completely packed full) is a vice of mine. I can’t help it. As long a book has an enticing name or a delicious looking photo on the cover (doesn’t that describe every cookbook?) I’m bound to at least investigate it.
When purchasing a cookbook from Amazon, I always read a couple of customer reviews to see what other readers thought about it. The complaint that seems to be most frequent about cookbooks is that often enough they do not have pictures showing what every recipe looks like. This is an annoying quality right?
Well, I’m always sniffing around for new chocolate peanut butter recipes on the web and many times they don’t have pictures. While searching today, I came across this recipe for Chocolate Peanut Butter Mousse Cake from Southern Living that has a picture and immediately thought of posting it. But it’s not all that different from other CPB desserts I’ve written about so I kept looking around.
Shortly after I came across this fantastic sounding Peanut Butter Banana Pudding Dessert which doesn’t have a picture, but after reading the ingredients and very short and easy instructions, it had me drooling. So, from my recipe searching experience today, I want to take this opportunity to encourage you to take a look at one of your cookbooks and try baking something in there that doesn’t have a photo accompanying it. Just because it’s a words-only recipe doesn’t mean it’s any less delicious than the photographed ones. And it’s easy enough to imagine what it looks like - just read through the instructions step-by-step (which you should be doing before you bake anything to ensure that you are capable of the recipe / have time to make the recipe) and picture the progress of the dessert as you read.
Of course it occurs to me that maybe having a photographed cookbook is more of a convenience thing since it’s easier to glance at a photo than sit, read and imagine a recipe. But regardless of the reason for your hesitance, go seek out a photo-lacking recipe and give it a chance. And if you’re too lazy to look for a recipe on your own, try this Peanut Butter Banana Pudding one.
(And incase you want some help on this one, it’s a layer of chocolate wafer sandwiches that are filled with peanut butter, topped with a layer of sliced bananas, topped with custard, topped with whipping cream and garnished with roasted peanuts. See what you would have missed out on if you passed this recipe by?)