Sandra Lee’s Eighth Ring of Hell: Groovy Goodies

CHAPTER 8: FRAUD, PIMPING & SEDUCING, FLATTERY, SIMONY, SORCERY, POLITICAL CORRUPTION, HYPOCRISY, THEFT, FRAUDULENT RHETORIC, DIVISIVENESS, FALSIFICATION—WHIPPED BY DEMONS; IMMERSED IN EXCREMENT; INVERTED BAPTISM; HEADS TWISTED; IMMERSED IN BOILING PITCH; DON GILDED LEAD CLOAKS & WALK LISTLESSLY; BITTEN BY SNAKES & LIZARDS; ENCASED IN FLAMES; HACKED INTO PIECES BY DEMONS; AFFLICTED WITH DISEASES

Phew—that is one LONG list of horrors for this chapter of Cool Kids’ Cooking!

So this is what would normally be my favorite chapter of any cookbook: desserts! I have a major sweet tooth, so you might think I would be less appalled by Sandy’s takes on after-dinner treats. However, as a connoisseur of sweets, I can spot what recipes I’d like (or in this case, which are abominations that never should have seen the light of day, let alone be published for the public to consume).

First, let’s take a look at Sandra’s “groovy” introduction:

At age 9, my niece, Stephanie, is the little hostess with the mostest. Plan a party and she’ll work up the menu, organize the ingredients, and make the table look amazing. But what she’s really into is baking. She’ll join me on my Food Network® show and we’ll bake up goodies by the gazillion. Fiendin’ for fun food? Cherry Cream Cheese Blondies and Peanut Butter Cup Cupcakes are all that. Mo-om, turn the oven on. NOT! No-Bake Oreo® Cheesecake and Banana Split Mini Pies need just two hands and a spoon. For the next bake sale, let the others bring some half-baked brownies—you’re bringing the good stuff.

A couple of things right off the bat. First, Sandy’s poor attempts at comedy with a whiny “Mo-om” and use of “NOT” strike me as very dated. Like, Wayne’s World popularized the latter phrase, and just because Borat was saying it doesn’t make this funny in the context of a kid’s cookbook. As I wrote in the margins, “Wow, 1991 is calling!”

Secondly, the alliteration of “Fiendin’ for fun food” is so awkward and makes no sense. The only context that term works is if she’s talking about drugs. I mean, being high would certainly help someone get through eating Sandra’s desserts, but I don’t think that’s what she intended. And I personally cannot read “half-baked brownies” and not immediately think of Dave Chappelle’s movie that he cowrote with Neal Brennan back in the day (Neal even makes a quick cameo in the famous Scarface quitting scene haha).

Finally, you just KNEW Sandy would engage in name-dropping her awful cooking show in one of these introductions. I would expect nothing less from her.

Okay, so now that we’ve read her intro, let’s take a look at the 11 recipes that make up the “Groovy Goodies.”

The recipes include Rainbow Ribbon Cake (with Lifesavers for birthday candle holders apparently), Tie-Dyed Cupcakes, Peanut Butter Cup Cupcakes (no Reese’s PB cups in this despite the name), Crazy Cranberry Can Cakes (or KKKK as I call it due to her previous endeavor Kurtain Kraft), No-Bake Oreo Cheesecake, Banana Split Mini Pies, PB&J Bread Pudding, Purple Strawberry Crumble, Cherry Cream Cheese Blondies, Cherry Chip Cookies, and Dino Cookies.

Mmm…Lifesavers candy on a cake!

Looks like even the editors realized how bizarre those candle holders appear, so they removed them from the back cover. Can’t fool me though!

Could you imagine going to a bake sale and being offered a Sandra Lee cake in a can for $1? That’s the stuff of nightmares.

None of those recipes sound THAT bad, right? Just you wait.

Also, before I dive into dissecting these desserts (see, Sandra Lee, I can use alliteration too!), I would be remiss to not mention the infamous angel food cake trifecta that she is most known for online.

While none of these appear in her kids’ cookbook, the store-bought angel food cakes with store-bought frosting slathered on top (and don’t forget the apple pie filling in the center!) are some of her most disgusting creations. Here’s the episode if you’ve never seen her Kwanzaa Kake being made as well as the Hanukkah and Christmas Kakes. So nauseating!

So Sandra is known for taking an AFC and covering it with canned frosting, calling that a dessert. Luckily for us, no angel food cakes made it into the cookbook.

Now let’s take a deeper look at some of the goodies that did make the cut!

We start off with a recipe everyone knows: No-Bake Oreo Cheesecake. This combination is so common, in fact, that Oreo puts out its own boxed version!

How does Aunt Sandy muck it up? Let’s find out!

The ingredients are Oreos (obviously), Philadelphia cream cheese (NO!), sugar, sour cream, vanilla, Cool Whip, premade chocolate pie crust, and even more Oreos for some reason (I guess for decoration?).

I am so disappointed that Philadelphia was okay with being mentioned in this cookbook after I was lauding them in the previous chapter for staying away from Sandra Lee’s abominations. Sigh…

Anyway, the recipe as a whole is pretty standard for a no-bake cheesecake. I wouldn’t warm up cream cheese in a microwave to soften it, personally, since just leaving it out for a few hours ahead of time achieves the same goal, but it’s hardly her worst culinary direction.

The final line of the recipe says to “top each slice with a whole chocolate sandwich cookie” (why can’t she just say an Oreo?). Now that seems odd to me. A cookie crumble like the boxed version would be easier to eat, but I guess it’s like a snack to go with your dessert? I wouldn’t put a whole cookie on a pie slice as it would likely become cumbersome for your guests.

But this is the real reason I wanted to discuss this recipe—to illustrate the dessert, there is a drawing of a hippie girl in pigtails wearing a tie-dyed purple and magenta tee, torn jeans, flip flops, a white headband, sunglasses, and love beads eating the Oreo cheesecake while lying down on a lawn chair. It’s…certainly memorable if nothing else.

My conspiracy theory about this random image is that the editors meant to place it with the Tie-Dyed Cupcake recipe, but some wires got crossed and she ended up with the Oreo dessert instead. Why else would she be wearing a TIE-DYED t-shirt? I rest my case.

Okay, moving on to another dessert, let’s take a closer look at Cherry Chip Cookies. I am not a big fan of cherries in any form, but I’m hoping that aside from that choice, the rest will be okay.

The “Food you’ll need” (Sandy’s way of saying ingredients) for this recipe…I kid you not…starts with 1 tube of Pillsbury refrigerated sugar cookie dough.

Wow. That this is in a COOKBOOK is quite astonishing. Don’t get me wrong—I love cookie dough that I can just shape and toss in the oven, as my husband can attest to after buying it so many times. They even have ones now that you can eat raw or bake!

My go-to version is rolling the dough into balls, tossing it in my cinnamon sugar mixture that I always have on hand, and then flattening them slightly before throwing them into the oven for 12 minutes. They come out like simplified Snickerdoodles and absolutely hit the spot when my sweet tooth is craving sugar at night haha.

I mention all of this to point out I am NOT against using Pillsbury products at all. What I find mind-boggling is that Sandra put this in her cookbook when making sugar cookie dough is NOT that complex—it’s basically sugar and butter with an egg and some flour to hold it together.

Anyway, after that inexplicable choice, Sandra Lee’s next ingredients are dried cherries (the Cherry part of the title), white chocolate pieces (the Chip part, I guess), chopped nut topping (she used this for her Stuffed Celery that I covered in Chapter 6 as well and I still don’t know what nuts that includes), and cherry extract (ew).

So the recipe says to knead the dough with all the ingredients I’ve listed above. How is this easier than just slicing and baking the sugar cookies? You have to dirty up a bowl for no reason, and I’m all about limiting the dishes I have to wash as much as possible.

After that, the recipe is a standard cookie one. I do like how she stresses the following:

The middle should still be a little soft. (DO NOT overbake.).

It’s not only a good rule of thumb when it comes to baking cookies, but it’s also got a hint of a disturbing ultimatum (or else what, Sandy? Are you going to be poisoned and die if they are overbaked?). Such fun for the kiddies to be threatened while cooking!

Our final recipe in this chapter is pretty much the main reason I wanted to do this series. I’ve been a professional copy editor and proofreader for over 20 years now (oof…that makes me feel so old!), so I know that I have a sharp eye for noticing mistakes that others overlook—it’s a blessing and a curse.

So when I first bought and read Cool Kids’ Cooking in 2007, I had just started my editing career in educational publishing after grad school and my eyes were trained to look out for any layout issues as well as typos and stuff.

I’m not going to point out the issue here—I want to know if others see it as quickly as I did. I will divulge the insane error later that proves to me that NO ONE has read this cookbook as closely as I have, including the so-called editors.

Anyway, here is the recipe for Dino Cookies in its entirety. Do you see the problem? I will explain it at the end of this post if you’re curious!

Anyway, let’s take a closer look. The ingredients are a bag of sugar cookie mix…wait a minute. The previous cookies used refrigerated dough, but this one involves actual mixing with an egg and flour? I am so confused. Why couldn’t she do this for both? Ugh!

Okay, enough trying to make sense of Aunt Sandy’s choices. The other ingredients are flour, Philadelphia cream cheese AGAIN (sob), an egg, more flour for some reason, M&Ms, and optional edible rock candy and palm trees.

Let’s hold off on discussing the rock candy and palm trees for now and focus on just the cookies themselves. Again, Sandra recommends warming up the cream cheese in the microwave, which I have explained is unnecessary if you just soften it by letting the package get to room temperature ahead of time.

I also think rolling out this dough to make dinosaur cutout cookies is a lot for someone who wants easy recipes. I get that kids like cutting shapes (supposedly), but it seems like a lot of work. We would only do that for Christmas because it was a whole process and, even then, my siblings preferred decorating the cookies as opposed to cutting them out.

And who happens to have a 3-inch dinosaur-shape cookie cutter on hand as this recipe assumes? I have never even seen such a cookie cutter, so that’s an extra purchase and not something right out of your pantry as Sandy always promotes.

After cutting out the shapes, the next step is to press “mini chocolate pieces” into the cookies. Again, why can’t she say M&Ms? It’s listed in the ingredients. I don’t get it.

Once the cookies are decorated, they go in the fridge to chill for 15 minutes. I guess this is to keep the dough from spreading? If I’m making cookie dough from scratch, I always leave the dough to cool in the refrigerator for the night and then bake them the next day. I’m not sure 15 minutes is enough time, but that’s what Sandy recommends.

The final line of the recipe ahead of her explanation for the palm trees is absolutely insane to me:

Surround cookies with rock candy and Edible Palm Trees (optional).

What children are setting up Dino sugar cookie dioramas that need rocks and palm trees? Whom and what is this optional tip for? And I’m sorry, but rock candy to me is the crystallized sugar on a stick, not candy that looks like rocks as the picture depicts.

My concept of rock candy

Sandy’s candy shaped like literal rocks

So that’s the insane recipe for Dino Cookies. It starts out relatively normal in terms of Sandra’s typical concoctions, but then takes a hard left into Crazyville with rock candy and edible trees.

And that’s it for Chapter 8! This is one of the most gruesome rings of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, so it makes sense that her desserts are some of the worst and most appalling recipes in the entire cookbook.

As a special bonus, I actually went ahead and made a Sandra Lee recipe from this cookbook for the first time on 5/26/26! It was a harrowing experience, to be sure, and Jeff and I both taste-tested the results.

I chose the PB&J Bread Pudding from this chapter because I like peanut butter, I like jelly, and I LOVE bread pudding. Seems like it should work out, right? Right?

No weird extracts or bizarre additions,, so the recipe seems to be relatively tame in the SLop pantheon of foods.

Of course, I had to make a few substitutions and additions. First, I would never use basic vanilla extract in a baked good. Thanks to Ina Garten and her “good vanilla” proselytizing on her shows, I only use Nielsen-Massey Madagascar Bourbon Pure Vanilla Extract. Call me a food snob if you must, but once you have real vanilla extract, you won’t return to McCormick any time soon. The extra cost is absolutely worth it!

So, I definitely changed out the vanilla. Next, I used Reese’s Peanut Butter instead of Skippy’s because it is my favorite brand. I also switched out strawberry preserves for strawberry jam and used half and half instead of milk since those were the items I had on hand.

And in terms of additions, there was only one obvious missing ingredient for me: Cinnamon! I adore the spice and add it to so many items (tea, oatmeal, cookies, and even brownies). It just makes everything taste better haha.

Seinfeld certainly got this right!

Those were my only deviations from Sandra Lee’s recipe, and I think all of them were reasonable compared to some of Sandy’s more infamous additions (artichokes in her Tortilla Casserole, anyone?).

I followed the recipe directions exactly and made five peanut butter and jam sandwiches while Jeff cut them into four identical pieces. I then placed them in my 8x8 pan (I didn’t have a 2.5 quart casserole dish to use) and poured the milk mixture over the sandwiches.

I thought this would be a quick recipe, but I was so wrong. The sandwich/egg mixture had to sit in the fridge for an hour and then cook for ANOTHER hour. I started at 9 p.m. and didn’t get to try it until 11:30 p.m.

So, once the concoction was FINALLY done baking, I let it cool for 10 minutes and then cut up sections for Jeff and me. The bread pudding had initially puffed up in the oven but had settled to looking normal-ish again, so I served it up with a scoop of vanilla ice cream for each of us.

The end result of my first (and hopefully last) Sandra Lee recipe

My slice with ice cream (which was definitely the best part)

Jeff’s slice (he concurred that the ice cream tasted better)

Here are our thoughts on the bread pudding:

Jeff: 5/10

This tasted like a soggy PB&J sandwich, which is what it essentially was. The bread wasn’t stale enough, so the end result was too soft. Some crunch would have helped. The flavor was okay, but I won’t eat it again willingly.

SUCH: 6/10

This was a depressing creation. I wouldn’t serve this to guests, but it’s okay for a late night sweet tooth craving. Took way too long to make.

So that was not as bad as I had expected (probably since I used ingredients that I like and not the ones Sandy is shilling for), but the aftertaste was terrible and we both felt like we had upset stomachs that night.

Neither of us wanted to eat any more of the bread pudding (and it ended up in its rightful location: the trash can), so it certainly was not the rousing success that Sandra Lee always promises.

Bye-bye, PB&J Bread Pudding. You will not be missed!

A better combination, in my opinion, would be a grilled peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwich. Think of a grilled cheese, but with PB&J instead of the cheese part. Cook it up in a frying pan with some butter until golden brown on both sides and slice in half so you can enjoy the gooey peanut butter and jam. Absolutely delicious and way faster than this culinary disaster.

Now THAT is the end of chapter eight. I hope you’ve enjoyed the series so far, and the final post will be about Sandra Lee’s greatest love: Cocktail Time! How will she take her boozy recipes and make them palatable for children? Stay tuned!

If you would like to read about rings 1-7, please click here.

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Okay, now it’s time to explain the egregious error in Dino Cookies: the final line just ENDS in the middle of the sentence!

The directions for how to make edible palm trees say the following:

Form the gumdrop over a

And that is IT. Over a what, Aunt Sandy? I feel as disappointed as I did as a kid watching the Owl answer the riddle in the Tootsie Pop ad. The world may never know…

This also proves no one gave a shit about Sandra’s cookbook, and they just pumped it out as quickly as possible. Any proofreader worth their salt would have caught that obvious mistake and flagged it to be fixed. Disgraceful to say the least.

And that’s the REAL end to this Groovy Goodies chapter. Stay tuned for more comedy fun!