Announcing…The Great Rare Books Bake Off 2022!

It is the most wonderful time of the year! The Great British Bake Off Season 13 is currently airing and the weather is finally cooling down here on FSU campus. This will be our third year of celebrating all things baking, cooking, and mixing here in FSU Special Collections & Archives. This year we are

The Great Rare Books Bake Off Finale

As November has come to a close so has our Annual FSU Special Collections & Archives Great Rare Books Bake Off. We have had a month full of mixing, baking, cooking, and exploring. Our recipes ranged from cookies, stews, and bacon pancakes, to milk punch, bread pudding, and cakes. Diving into the stacks, our contributors learned

The Jelly Roll – The Perfect Cake for the Holiday Season

As someone who has been a long-time fan of the Great British Baking Show, I knew I wanted to try and make a showstopping cake for my recipe. After perusing through cookbooks for different cakes, I found one from 1905 for a Jelly Roll from The New England Cook Book: the Latest and Best Methods for Economy and Luxury at Home.

Excellent Cookies: Are they, in fact, excellent?

This is a guest post to Illuminations for the Great Rare Books Bake Off by Sofia Varela, Digital Library Center Assistant. I don’t bake frequently but, when I do, I stick to the same cookie recipe which is fine by me but my family has grown a bit tired of it. When I was looking

You Can’t Go Wrong With Bread Pudding, Right?

This post was written by Emily Castillo for the SCA Great Rare Books Bakeoff. Bread pudding is a timeless dessert that plenty of people have tried at least once. In my case, I first tried it when my mom was on a food experimenting binge in high school. There were some good (and not so

Cheese Toast – The Country Kitchen

This recipe was attempted by Chelsea McClellan, an accounting representative who works in the admin suite of Strozier Library.  She has been with the University for four months and considers her baking skills to be non-existent. For the Rare Books Bake Off I decided to recreate Cheese Toast from the cookbook titled The Country Kitchen. 

They Call This Simmer: Bigos and the Wild World of Family Recipes

This is a guest post to Illuminations for the Great Rare Books Bake Off by Devin Burns, Religion Ph.D. Student. When I was seven, my grandmother taught me how to make stuffed cabbage or golabki. For a whole day, we washed and cooked the cabbage, cooked the beef, cut vegetables, rolled the meat into the

To Make (or Not to Make) a Bacon Froize

This year when we announced the Rare Books Bakeoff, I knew that I had to enlist my roommate Michelle because we both enjoy cooking and History. What better way to understand the past than to cook your way through it? Michelle perused The queen-like closet, or, Rich cabinet last month from Diginole and found the

Clarified Milk Punch: A case for curdling your cocktails

In rare books cooking, it is not difficult to find truly vile recipes: aspic, cakes with ambergris, beef tea pudding. Every once in a while, however, it’s possible to find something that reads as viscerally disgusting on the page, but actually turns out delicious in practice (think depression-era tomato soup cake). I have recreated one

FSU Special Collections & Archives Presents: The Great Rare Books Bake Off Cocktail/Mocktail Week

Welcome to the first week of the FSU Special Collections & Archives Great Rare Books Bake Off! As always, we begin our week with a series of cocktails and mocktails. Please go visit our earlier post this week to see how to participate! Because we’re back on campus this semester, for this first post we’re showing