Queezle_Sister's Reviews
8 recipe(s) reviewed. Showing 1 to 8Sort by: Title 
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Pillsbury Best Desserts: More Than 350 Recipes from America's Most-Trusted Kitchen
By Pillsbury Editors
Wiley - 1998
Very dense and rich chocolate cake, served with two sauces - white chocolate and raspberry. This was sublime! Perfect texture on the cake, melt-in-your-mouth delicate texture, and a pure chocolate flavor. The two sauces served as a nice counterpoint. I think I like the sauce better than frosting, especially the raspberry one.
Note - the instructions say to beat eggs and sugar till they appear lemon colored. I was not sure what that really meant, but after about 1 1/2 minutes, the mixture became much lighter, and the color a milkier yellow, and I stopped there.
The raspberry sauce specifies grinding the thawed raspberries in a blender and then sieving out the seeds. I found it easy enough to go straight to the sieve. Took me about 10 minutes, but the result was worth it.
This is the first cake to celebrate 12 daughter's transition to 13 daughter! She was very pleased with it.
useful (1)
Cranberry Upside-Down Cake : page 58
A wonderful combination of tart sticky cranberries and light lemony cake. The edges of the cake were delightfully crunchy.
The method here seems unusual to me. Step 1 is to sandwich fresh cranberries between two layers of sugar, in an 8x8 pan, and bake 30 minutes. When the 30 minutes are done, you spread a nice cake batter that contains lemon zest, and return it to the oven for another 40 minutes.
Instructions for turning out the cake include leaving the pan upside down but in place for 2 minutes - this leaves time for the sticky cranberries to drop down onto the cake.
Be careful spooning batter onto the cranberries. I must have put too much in the middle of the pan, as in the final product the cranberries were missing in the center. That spot where the batter hit the pan didn't come out particularly well, but this was clearly a mistake by the cook.
This is an easy cake, and simple to prepare for my precious teenagers on a week night. It was low fat, and not overly sweet.
useful (0)
Lemon Pudding Cake : page 46
Light and lemon - the perfect dessert to lift your spirits after those post-holiday winter doldrums (and yet so good that I'd eat it in any season).
Three eggs, separated, and use to make (a) a yolk-milk-lemon juice-sugar-flour-zest-salt combination and (b) stiff peaks. Then folded together, and baked in a hot water bath.
We are all lemon crazy here, and couldn't wait for it to cool. We found that the pudding was very thin, but as it cooled, it thickened up. Next time, I won't tell anyone what I'm making, and I'll let it sit for 15 minutes.
The top cake-like part was very very light and perfectly browned.
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Norwegian Hazelnut Cake : page 56
Dense and delicious -- this cake uses a lot of hazelnuts (ground up), and is baked in a 10 inch springform pan. The resulting cake is only about 1.25 inches high, but its quite elegant.
The frosting is heavy cream mixed with chocolate chips. Yum!
Not only delicious, I was able to make, cook, and frost this cake in less than 2 hours.
We prepared this for my daughter's birthday (today), 16 years old!
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Old Fashioned Buttermilk Brownies : page 320
I selected this recipe for its speed of preparation and for the quantity it made - and didn't expect much. To my surprise, it was delightful!
What I love about this recipe is that it keeps its promise of 20 minutes preparation time. That they tasted good is the proverbial icing on the cake.
These are cake-like brownies, which you frost with a chocolate-coconut frosting. The 20 minute prep time includes both making the cookies and preparing the frosting. All the chocolate is from cocoa, which in my house means they are easily made with pantry ingredients.
useful (2)
Soft and Chewy Cocolate Chip Cookies : page 293
This recipe made cookies that looked so perfect you might have thought they were purchased from a store. We followed the high-altitude instructions, which had us use less sugar and less butter. The reduced butter made it difficult to mix, but the cookies cooked up perfectly, and they were lovely chewy chocolate chip. I wouldn't hesitate to make these again.
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Upside Down Gingerbread : page 36
If you cannot decide if you want gingerbread or a pineapple upside down cake, choose this recipe. It included a wonderful upside-down cake topping (with pineapple, cranberries, and pecans), and a moist and delicious gingerbread. We served it with vanilla ice cream, but whipped cream might have been better.
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Upside-Down Gingerbread : page 36
A perfect combination of flavors. The topping, and lets face it, we all eat upside down cake for the topping - had pineapple, cranberries, and pecans - a lovely mix of sour, sweet, soft, and crunchy. Richness of the gingerbread was a perfect complement.
This cake was prepared previously by my mother for her rug hooker group, and they rated it "wow!" and "loved it". I wouldn't change a thing about this recipe.
useful (3)