We studied the Doña Tomàs cookbook, of the eponymous Oakland Cal-Mexican restaurant, by cooking a few recipes for a dinner party.

We tried three, and we can safely say that Thomas Schnetz and Dona Savitsky's batting average with the clumsy home cook is a respectable .667. We had a decent success with the budín de elote, a recipe of which you can find here. It was a fluffy corn pudding with bits of zucchini, light and tasty as summer.

We scored a home run with the flan de rosas, a rose water flavored flan with a caramel topping. We made it twice, and twice it went poof and disappeared. The hardest part turned out to locate the rose water, which we now know you can find at Rainbow, Berkeley Bowl or, of all places, Golden Produce (and not across Church Street at the Market Safeway).

Find out which recipe the Gastronomique fluffed after the jump!

We clunked the chile en nogada, a recipe of stuffed poblano peppers in a walnut sauce, which we only loosely followed anyway. We strayed from the book's recipe because it stuffs the peppers with sweet potatoes instead of the heartier pork of tradition, and we needed our proteins. For what it's worth, it is a very seasonal recipe RIGHT NOW, as it is cooked to celebrate Mexico's Independence Day, on September 16th. Green chile, white walnut sauce, red pomegranate seed: the Mexican flag.

We did follow the advice of roasting the walnuts, but that turned out to be a bad idea: the flavor of the walnuts came out too strong, and the color was too dark for the sauce and we were not going to peel walnuts -- are you crazy or what?

We liked the graphic design and the layout of the recipes, which are clear and easy to follow. We found the quantities to be a bit off, though -- we ended up making two budin de elote, as what we prepared did not fit in one dish. Also, the rose flan requires almost 5 cups of ingredients to fit into 6 ramekins. We don't have XXXL big gulp thirsty-two onces ramekins, so we had to go with one large soufflé dish filled to the gills instead.

But we like generous helpings and recipes that don't stinge. And if the end results taste good, as it did, we're glad to have more.