Friday, November 14, 2014

Ben & Jerry's Book-Inspired Ice Cream Flavors by Quirk Books

Berry Potter and the Container of Secrets: Muggles rejoice!  Inside this container you'll find a magical blend of butter beer, Bertie Bott's Strawberry Flavour Beans and chocolate frogs.  No need to employ the Dark Arts.

Oliver Twist: Indulge in this mix of rich dark chocolate and simple vanilla flavors with a smattering of English Toffee.  Eat sparingly, for a combination like this begs you to ask "Please, sir, I want some more."

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish
Make a wish, look inside your dish
Inside your dish, there's candy fish
Candy fish in chocolatey goo
inside the goo are marshmallows too
All this combines for the perfect snacks
The perfect snacks to share with a Zax

War and Peach: An ambitious, sweeping, and impeccably detailed frozen treat of truly epic proportions, with so many ingredients that you'll forget most of them existed by the time you're halfway through your cone. Not easy to get through without a headache, but if you make it, you can brag about finishing it for the rest of your life.

Whirled War Z: Nothing is off-limits during the impending zombie apocalypse. Gummy worms crawl through a swirl of vanilla, chocolate and strawberry ice cream.  Beware of the random splattering of cherries.  You'll want to stockpile these rations when the uprising occurs.

A Clockwork Orange Creamsicle: A concoction made with milk-plus direct from Korova so disturbingly delicious you won't have to force it down!

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Book Review: Vegan Holiday Cooking from Candle Cafe by Joy Pierson, Angel Ramos & Jorge Pineda


I have an obsession with vegan cookbooks.  I am not a vegan, and I rarely eat vegan, but I love the idea of vegan food.  I just don't really have the willpower to quit eggs and cheese.  But anyways, I know vegan cookbooks very well.  I have a large collection of them, and I like poring over them and imagining cooking and eating this delicious food.  I have indeed cooked a lot of vegan recipes from my favorite books (my absolute favorite is The Veganomicon by Isa Chandra Moskovitz and Terry Hope Romero), and the recipes are often delicious and complicated.  However, this is the first vegan cookbook I've seen that is as beautiful as this book, with recipes as sophisticated and refined as these. Vegan cookbooks generally focus more on delicious but simple food.  These recipes look totally doable, but they reach a level of complexity in flavor combinations that I haven't seen elsewhere.  This is in part due to the fact that the book is aimed, as the title suggests, at cooking for special occasions, and the book is organized as a series of menus for different holidays throughout the year.  Recipes that sound particularly intriguing and complex to me include Scallion Pancakes with Homemade Kimchi and Wasabi Aioli for Lunar New Year, Morel-Crusted Tofu with Sautéed Mushrooms and Fennel and Pomegranate Salad for Valentine's Day, Chickpea Crepes with Berries and Vanilla-Lavendar Cream for Passover, Pumpkin Seed-Crusted Tempeh with Roasted Ginger-Maple Sweet Potatoes and Cranberry-Orange Relish for Thanksgiving, and Truffle Tofu Medallions with Wild Mushrooms and Pinot Gris Sauce for New Year's Eve.  This food sounds and looks more like what you would eat at a nice vegan restaurant than what one generally finds in vegan cookbooks.  I've eaten at Candle Cafe once, and these recipes sound just like the yummy food I had there.  I wouldn't cook this kind of thing every day (although that's not, again, to say that these recipes look very complicated, which they don't...I'm just very lazy), but this is perfect food for special occasions. The book also includes many yummy-sounding desserts and cocktails.  

(I received this book from the Blogging for Books program in exchange for an honest review.)

Skeem Trompe l'Oeil Book Spine Fireplace Matches

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Penguin Pocket Classics Designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith

Coralie Bickford-Smith is at it again.  Here is yet more gorgeous cover design work from her for Penguin Books.  The Penguin Pocket Classics are clothbound with bright two-tone linen covers with beautiful stamped abstract patterns.  The books include non-fiction by Virginia Woolf, Freud, Marx, and Saint Augustine.

Thursday, November 6, 2014

Beautiful Cover Design: Gwendolen by Diana Souhami

Diana Souhami's first novel Gwendolen takes a secondary character from George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and imagines her inner life.  I love a book about books, and the cover of this book is gorgeous, and reflects the self-referentiality of Gwendolen: the cover of the first edition (1876) of Daniel Deronda (you can see the cover below) is overlaid with a pink toe shoe-esque ribbon that twists around a painted nineteenth-century fashion plate with a bow and arrow.  It's a gorgeous design, and the book sounds wonderful!  It's available in paperback in March 2015.