Prepare Poké-Snacks in My Pokémon Baking Book

Everyone and everything eats, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale. Some have a specific diet while others can recover from just about anything, but if there’s one thing people are good at, it’s taking a simple system and making it complicated at the same time. beyond all belief or reason. There are millions of recipes around the world that take a few basic ingredients and jazz them up with all kinds of whimsy, sometimes creating edible works of art and sometimes just enjoyable snacks. My Pokémon Baking Book is a collection of menagerie-themed recipes from Nintendo’s Battle Zoo, and while Pokémon and dessert don’t seem to have much to do with each other, the results are cute and delicious.

The cookbook is divided into nine chapters, each featuring a collection of snacks, desserts, and the occasional bread themed after the Pokémon of a specific region. The opening chapter of the Kanto region, for example, contains Poké Ball-shaped conchas, Doduo-themed chocolate macaroons, Pikachu face cupcakes, and a few others. All recipes come with artwork of the Pokémon they’re based on to solidify the theme in place, but not all have an image of the final product, which could have been more helpful. The flavor text for each recipe is at the top of the page with the rest of the basic information. So, unlike many cookbooks, you don’t need to read someone’s life story to get started in baking. With just a glance at the list of ingredients you can tell which ones will be the most interesting, and all recipes are ranked on a difficulty scale of one to four so you don’t put yourself too far over the top. your head.

I had to take out the recipe book for a test run, make a few desserts and bookmark a few more for later, and as with anything baking, the results are better with experience. The Togepi-themed confetti mug cake was easy to make; Simply mix a few ingredients in a twenty-ounce cup, beat with a fork, add a few sprinkles for color, microwave, and serve with ice cream. Turns out the sprinkles are best if they’re the pure colored sugar type, since a whole egg for a cup-sized cake will impart a somewhat eggy flavor without the sweetener to mask it. A good ice cream complements the cake well, making it a quick and easy single-serve dessert. Granted, it’s a bit of a stretch to say that throwing sprinkles into a cake in the microwave makes it Togepi themed, but close enough.

The other recipe I tried was a Taillow themed olive oil, cherry and chocolate cake, and as with any recipe, the first time I baked it, I followed the instructions on the letter. Although more complicated than the mug cake, this was also a one-star difficulty recipe and made with minimal fuss. The only issue I had was something common to several of the recipes in the book, in that some ingredients may require a trip to Amazon or another online retailer to find them. The cake is baked in an 8×8 pan and the Taillow theme comes from a drizzle of melted white chocolate, dark chocolate, and red candy melts on top. Not a single grocery store in my area had them and my attempt to use food coloring on white chocolate backfired when I discovered that my food coloring was water-based, causing the food to seize up. chocolate (Note: this is not a fault of the recipe book, but rather meeting deadlines and doing what I could find). An 8×8 baking dish is a standard sized item, so having a target volume for how much drizzle to use would have been nice, but like cheese and garlic, it’s best to measure the glaze by heart, so everything went well. Finally, it is best to cut the dried cherries called for by the recipe in half before adding them, because otherwise they could be large in the cake. The cake was still incredibly tasty, but a few more lines about the prep work would have made it better.

The Taillow theme fails without the red candy melts on top, but no complaints about the flavor.

There are quite a few recipes in the book that I can’t wait to try in addition to the ones I’ve had time to test, most of which work better with the Pokémon theme than the ones I’ve been able to make . Not only are the Whismur-themed Lemon Lavender Bars delicious, but the yellow cake with lavender frosting matches the colors perfectly and the eyes with the plus sign of the black gel frosting are simple enough for beginner bakers and perfectly reflect the look of the Pokémon. The sweet orange cardamom buns made from Scraggy look delicious and look almost exactly like Scraggy’s head, a little more advanced in the decoration requirements but using simple shapes that shouldn’t be too difficult to make. The only reason I had to pass on this recipe is that it is another recipe requiring online ordering, with the dried papaya required for the red scale on top of Scraggy’s head being impossible to find on store shelves. The candied orange peel ingredient tends to be a seasonal product, but it was simple enough that store purchase wasn’t necessary.

Whether you’re a beginner baker or an experienced cook, My Pokémon Baking Book has lots of fun recipes. Some are simple enough to get right the first time, while others may require a bit of experimentation to get perfectly balanced, but the variety is great. Mango-ginger bread pudding, focaccia, cakes of all shapes and sizes, éclairs, cupcakes, rolls, cookies and more are waiting for a hungry coach to make them. Granted, some themes are more of a slight suggestion of the Pokémon while others are much more obvious, but overall it makes for an inviting book that’s as much fun to flip through as it is to plan the next bake.