My favorite standby cookbook is Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. I can always rely on a good result on something I make from there, and several of our family favorites came from those pages. I think I now have four of them, as I keep getting the updated editions.
I probably have over 300 cookbooks of all kinds, so I love several of them. Two that I rely on for desserts are A Piece of Cake by Susan Purdy and The Cake Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum.
I decorate cakes occasionally. It's an artistic outlet for me. (Sounds kind of funny, but it's true.) I've done a few wedding cakes,and I made a pool table, complete with icing "nets" as the pockets, the same color bed as his real pool table, and tiny little candy pool balls. The cue was a thin, chocolate-coated candy stick. It turned out really well and looked just like his pool table!
I'm a packrat, too, unfortunately. I have a hard time throwing anything away.
I came across a poem that I had written in 8th grade and had forgotten. I was surprised that it was really not bad at all, so you might have been surprised at the books your father found. It would have been interesting to see whether you might have incorporated any of those ideas, which you'd long forgotten, into some of the books you've written since your grandmother suggested you write.
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