Bingo 7: Right
I treat this square as “getting it right (or not)”. For one, I need this square for the only Bingo I’m likely to get this season, and two, the getting it right is key to this book Between Friends: The Recipes that Wrote Our Story.
So, once upon a time, there was a local literary author themed coffee shop attached to a gas station. Besides the book-themed décor, there was a massive list of flavor combos for drinks with literary names, including some of my favorites, the Steinbeck (favorite flavor combo, not favorite author) which was a caramel and toasted marshmallow, the Jules Verne (Neapolitan), and the Dolly (as in Parton), cherry-vanilla. This place hosted author events, especially a local author fair, and also (for reason) opened specially for a woman’s running group holiday party. This place also did a lot of their own baking, including one of the co-owners’ award-winning cinnamon rolls, although my favorite has to be the maple pecan scone. As local coffee place, they got it right.
But CoffeeShopReader you might wonder, where’s the book to review in all this? After a decade in business, Between Friends closed because the co-owners wanted to focus on their developing publishing company, and a sale of the coffee shop business fell through. But not long after all this happens, Between Friends the cookbook is released. This book was marketed (to the coffee shop community) as both the recipes for the shop (all coffee drinks are here) as well as most of the baked goods and food items.
2/3 of this book (182 plus-sized pages/271) is just the list of author themes drinks, many of which can almost interchangeably be done as lattes (hot or iced), frappes, or even milkshakes; other drink types included in the main part are the energy drinks, not-coffees, and a few other more specialized beverage recipes. The ratios are clear, instructions straightforward, and assuming you had the requisite syrups, overall pretty easy to follow. There are little stories attached to most of the recipe intros, and a few longer ones scattered throughout, but not too obtrusive if you’re here for the recipes.
I will say that all is not perfect; this book could have used a good editor. Why? For example, there are four scone recipes (including the maple-pecan). That should be a good thing (and it is) but the recipe intro for three of the four scone recipes (the maple pecan, the chocolate chip pecan, and the brown sugar) was copy pasted and not updated in any way. That’s the maple-pecan intro once before the maple pecan recipe, with the intended recipe, and once again after it. If part of the goal is to provide stories along with recipes, the stories should maybe match the recipes? This same problem happens again with the Chocolate Delight and the following Oreo Delight Trifle. Then finally, (to be fair this last thing might be intentional not an error, but it still doesn’t fit right with the rest of the book) recipe is probably the one the shop was asked most often about, which is why it is probably last (for the suspense), but the problem is that this is also the only recipe that is not scaled down for more individual use. It’s the business-sized version for multiple dozen. And it’s not something that as far as I can tell would be easier to calculate down, especially as it’s the final baked good of the book and that can be really tricky to get right.
