Review Detail

It's not important to know who celebrity cook Atherton is to enjoy this vegetarian tome for beginner cooks. Like the earlier Bake, Make and Learn to Cook (2021) (which had fantastic illustrations by Rachel Stubbs), this offers a variety of meals and snacks from a "green" perspective. It would be helpful to the planet if people ate less meat, and these recipes provide an easy and delicious way for children to convince their families to do just that.

I always like to see cookbooks with more practical meals than baking, and this starts out with some standards, along with a few unusual dishes. Tomato sauce, veggie burgers, and stir fry noodles are standards, but Eye Love Bread (bread with a sunny side up style egg baked on top of it) and corn and potato cakes will be new to most readers, and I may try the green spinach crepes myself, spread with homemade hummus.

There are also savory snacks, including a guacamole made with green peans, cheesy rabbit crackers with chia seeds, and bread crowns that reminded me of some of the elaborate projects in Harry Potter: The Official Harry Potter Baking Book by Joanna Farrow. Baked goods, such as a strawberry jam tart, sticky flapjack, and apple rock cakes, seem delightfully British, but the inclusion of "freezy grapes" seems a bit forced. I am sceptical that they taste like sorbet! For the truly motivated, there are "Showstoppers" including spring butterfly cupcakes. This has very good instructions for waht I learned a few years ago are "fairy cakes"-- you basically lop off the peak top of a cupcake, cut it in half, and stick it on top of the frosting so it looks like butterfly wings. Sort of. Finding out that this is what a fairy cake was one of the big disillusions of my adult life.