Can I restrict what biomes appear in my world?

Solution 1:

While this may not be what you are looking for, Mods are a great way to do this. World Generation is limited by what the game allows, so if you want to change how the world is created, you need to change the World Generation, which is probably not easy. Using a Mod can that changes this is the easiest way. Mods such as Biomes-O-Plenty add dozens of Biomes, and some (possibly Biomes-o-plenty, as i don't recall) also allow you to customize the variables so you can enable or disable certain Biomes, or even modify the size or frequency, often times in easy to modify text based files.

All you really have to do is pick one of the many free mod clients, and pick the mods you want. You may have to pick a large Mod pack however, and disable or deselect all the mods except for a few that you actually want if you want as close to vanilla as possible.