The new Peanuts Holiday Cookbook is a slick piece of work, a bright hardcover illustrated with a mix of Schulz strips, recycled Peanuts art from other projects, and new art done for this project by Peanuts kid books regulars Robert Pope and Scott Jeralds. It offers a fairly diverse set of dessert and snack items meant for family baking. The Peanuts content, that’s diverse as well, with project names based not only after the common characters (Lucy’s Lemon Drop Bars, Pigpen’s Dirt Cake) but also some deeper dives (José Peterson’s Bundt Cake, Eudora’s Adorable S’moras, The Goose Eggs’ Nog)

So the visual design is good, the Peanuts integration is good (although they do have a couple coconut-oriented recipes like Cormacaroons – sacrilege!), so the real question is: are the recipes any good? And while among the fifty-two recipes there are a few things that it’s too impossible to mess up (Flying Ace Root Beer Float), the rest will have to wait until the taste test.

Luckily, my ten year old is planning to make Lucy’s Wump Dump Cake next weekend for his we-never-got-around-to-having-a-birthday-party-and-now-its-too-late party, because it looks easy. So that’s a good sign.

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