Everyone and everything eats, from the smallest amoeba to largest whale. Some have a specific diet while others will scavenge just about anything, but if there’s one thing people are good at it’s taking a simple system and making it complicated beyond all belief or reason. There are millions of recipes in the world that take a few basic ingredients and get all kinds of fancy with them, sometimes creating edible art and sometimes just being enjoyably snacky. My Pokémon Baking Book is a collection of recipes themed around a menagerie taken from Nintendo’s combat 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 up into nine chapters, each one featuring a collection of snacks, desserts and the occasional bread themed around the Pokémon from a specific region. The opening Kanto Region chapter, for example, has Poké Ball-shaped conchas, Doduo-themed chocolate macaroons, Pikachu-faced cupcakes and a few others. All recipes come with art of the Pokémon they’re based on to cement the theme in place, but not all of them have an image of the final product, which might have been more helpful. The flavor text on every recipe is at the top of the page with the rest of basic information, so unlike many cookbooks, you don’t need to read someone’s life story to get to the baking. With a quick glance of the ingredient list you can tell which ones will be the most interesting, and all the recipes are graded on a difficulty scale of one to four so you won’t get in too far over your head.
I got to take the cookbook out for a test run, making a couple of deserts and bookmarking a few more for later, and like anything involving baking, the results are best with experience. The Togepi-themed confetti mug cake was easy to make; just toss some ingredients into a twenty ounce mug, beat with a fork, toss in some sprinkles for color, microwave, and serve with ice cream. The sprinkles, as it turns out, are best if they’re the pure colored sugar type, because one whole egg for a mug-sized cake is going to result in a somewhat eggy flavor without the sweetener to mask it. Good ice cream complements the cake nicely, making it a quick and easy single-serving desert. Granted, it’s a bit of a stretch saying that tossing sprinkles into a microwave cake makes it Togepi-themed, but close enough.
The other recipe I tested was a chocolate cherry olive oil cake with a Taillow theme, and as in any recipe the first time baking it I followed the instructions to the letter. While more complicated than the mug cake, it was also a one-star difficulty recipe, and came together with a minimum of fuss. The one issue I had was something common to several recipes in the book, in that some ingredients may require a trip to Amazon or another online retailer to find. The cake is baked in an 8x8 pan and the Taillow theme comes from drizzling 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 the white chocolate backfired when I discovered my food coloring was water-based, causing the chocolate to seize up (Note: this isn’t a fault of the cookbook, but rather working to deadline and making due with what I could find). An 8x8 baking pan is a standard sized item so having a target volume for the amount of drizzle to use would have been nice, but like cheese and garlic, frosting is best measured by one’s heart so it worked out OK. Finally, the dried cherries the recipe calls for are best cut in half before adding, seeing as they can be big in the cake otherwise. The cake was still incredibly tasty, but a few extra lines about prep-work would have made it better.
There are a good number of recipes in the book I’m looking forward to trying out in addition to the ones I had time to test, most of which work with the Pokémon theme better than the ones I was able to make. The Whismur-themed lemon lavender bars not only look delicious, but the yellow cake with lavender icing is a perfect color match and the black gel icing plus-sign eyes are simple enough for beginning bakers and perfectly nail the pokémon’s look. The orange cardamom sweet rolls based on Scraggy sound 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 hard to pipe on. The only reason I had to pass on that recipe is it’s another one 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 item, but that was easy enough to make that store-bought isn’t necessary.
Whether a beginning baker or experienced cook, there are a lot of fun recipes in My Pokémon Baking Book. Some are straightforward enough to nail the first time while others may take a bit of experimentation to balance just right, but the variety is excellent. Mango-ginger bread pudding, focaccia, cakes of all shapes and sizes, eclairs, cupcakes, rolls, cookies and a good amount more are all waiting for a hungry trainer to whip up. Granted, some of the themes are more of a mild suggestion of the Pokémon while others are much more obvious, but all together it makes for an inviting book that’s as fun to leaf through as it is to plan the next bake.
