Jennifer's Reviews > The Violet Bakery Cookbook

This has been my new favorite baking book - worth it for the oatmeal and candied orange cookies alone. They have the best texture and flavor of any oatmeal cookie I've eaten. They require homemade candied orange peel, but if you make some the rest can be frozen for future use, or dipped in chocolate and given as gifts. I love the technique of baking the dough from frozen. In the proportions given, it creates an amazing texture as it cooks from the outside in. This is also how you do several of the other cookies, including the famous double yolk chocolate chip cookies. The result is huge, decadent, and special as a dessert item.

I also appreciate her creative use of healthier ingredients such as whole grains, similar to Roxana Jullapat - they're not items you're cleverly sneaking in, they're the highlight of the recipe, and they really make the baked good special, as with the rye brownies.

Other recipes I've tried from this book are the prune and earl grey scones, blueberry/spelt/oat scones, comte and chutney toastie, buckwheat butter cookies, coconut macaroons, sweet potato/coconut/date/rye muffins, and quinoa/hazelnut/cherry granola (the only one I wasn't crazy about, because it turns out I don't like quinoa flakes.)

A few recipes have certain ingredients that are difficult to source, like plum petals, rose geranium, apricot kernels, and angelica. but the majority have very accessible ingredient lists. And some of the special ingredients are worth noting, such as the fig leaves for fig leaf ice cream. I had no idea they were edible, and it's exciting to think of the flavor combinations they might provide when I get my hands on them.