Book Cooking 2012

I have an idea.

A wonderful, terrible idea.

And I need your help.

That's right, YOU! Now pay attention.

For some bizarre reason that I'm not even going to begin to try making sense of, I love to bake in the summer. When the weather is 90 degrees and up, and the only air conditioning in my house is the overhead fan and a breeze through the open porch door, I love to crank up the oven and bake delicious sugary treats and taunt my friends with. And this year, I already know which recipes I want to experiment with.


For my birthday, I got a copy of The Unofficial Hunger Games Cookbook. It looks fantastic and I've been squealing over recipes for Annie and Finnick's wedding cake and Katniss' chesse biscuits for weeks now. In my haze of culinary nerdiness I got to thinking; why don't I bake things from a bunch of different fandoms?

I mean, why not? I could make lembas bread from Lord of the Rings or pretty much anything from Harry Potter (except fire whiskey because I think I need a magical still for that). There are Cult Smoothies from Going Bovine. Brian Jacques' Redwall series regularly made my mouth water as a preteen and I fondly remember goofing off with Roald Dahl's Revolting Recipes in grade school. Plus, I just took a quick look around Goodreads and discovered a plethora of fiction-inspired cookbooks.

My wonderful, terrible, and fattening idea has book-accomplices.

This summer, I want to start a blogging series where myself and (hopefully!) others will bake/cook/assemble recipes inspired by some of our favorite books. I need help, though, hence the hope for other participants. While I'd love nothing more than to spend my summer baking, I really doubt my boss is going to give me paid leave to indulge my inner geek, even if I offered to share the fruits of my labor with her. Plus, I need that paycheck to get ingredients with. A catch-22, that is.

The tentative plan is to get people signed-up to bake something and help them schedule when their post is due to go up. Ideally, this would be a weekly feature, traveling around a whole slew of blogs, but if only 2 or 3 people join my madness, well, we'll improvise something else.

Rules More Like Guidelines

• I don't care if people cook things from the same book or series, but I would like to get as much diversity in sources as possible. Diversity is the spice of life, you know, and spices are delicious.
• Give credit to the source so readers can look at what else they have to offer.
• If you don't want to post the full recipe, please give readers an outline of what was involved in the process and what the difficulty was in your opinion.
• Pictures or it didn't happen! ;)

 Please comment below or email me if you want to participate or have any questions. Spread the word! Summer 2012 shall be the summer of book cooking!