My Cookbook of the Week: Hershey’s Favorite Recipes
Welcome to Cookbook of the Week. In this series, I highlight cookbooks that are unique, easy to use, or just special to me. Finding a recipe online is easy, but flipping through a truly excellent cookbook is magic in itself.
I plan for this series to be a fun place to discover new voices in cooking—a place where I explore some niche topics and resurface classics. Since this is the first week of my cookbook series, I thought I’d start with one that has personal meaning. The very first cookbook I ever used: Hershey’s Most Favorite Recipes .
I don’t remember who gave it to me when I was a teenager, but this cookbook was a Christmas gift from someone in my family. There is some irony in this because apparently it was a parent and two of my three parents didn’t know what I was thinking about going into the food industry. I couldn’t have known it at the time, but that chocolate hardcover book, published in 2000, helped launch my career.
That winter I couldn’t stop trying each recipe because they really seemed doable. I chose giant peanut butter cookies for my first recipe and brought the really big ones to my school drama club bake sale. (Maybe it was for the Concert Band. Look, I was cool and it didn’t stop.) I left to perform in the choir or play the euphonium and returned to the table convinced that no one would buy my cookies. . Much to my delight, my cookies were the first to sell out. My first culinary ego boost and I’ve been on that level ever since.
A great cookbook for beginning bakers.
Nostalgia aside, I recommend this cookbook primarily to beginners, those looking for easy recipes, and chocolate dessert lovers. This book is a collection of crystal clear recipes with accessible ingredient lists. Naturally, Hershey’s promotes its brand in the ingredients list, but it also helps the reader believe that recipe after recipe has the same recognizable ingredients. Plus I still bought cocoa powder from them. It has jargon-free instructions that a new baker needs because he can actually visualize the steps before opening the bag of flour.
Most recipes are completed in three to five steps, which is truly remarkable considering how complex the recipes get. Maybe it’s just me and the particular algorithm that stalks my feed, but I keep seeing recipes for sweets online that require a lot of skill, practice, and time to make correctly. The culture of bragging isn’t very helpful for beginners, and this cookbook takes it back to the basics. Not boring, but just as it should be: simple, reliable and absolutely delicious.
Recipes You Can Expect
This is an entire cookbook dedicated to desserts. Most of them involve chocolate, but there are some recipes that focus on peanut butter, some that focus on fruit, and there’s an entire section dedicated to less dense, rich desserts called “The Light Side.” If you’re looking for a reliable classic that can be used again and again – a good chocolate cake, a simple brownie, a permanent cheesecake recipe. That’s it.
This week I decided to make the Hershey’s Perfectly Chocolate Cake on page 10 to see if it suited my more experienced palate. The recipe was concise, to the point, and the result was a rich, moist, dark chocolate cake. The only thing I want to point out is to double the frosting recipe if you like a thicker coating.
How to buy
I haven’t opened this cookbook in a while because I’ve lent it to my brother forever. Fortunately, it is still in print. I bought a copy new for a measly $8, and many sell it used for even less. I totally recommend this cookbook as a sweet gift, whether for yourself, a friend, or a nephew who seems to be into baking.