Category Archives: Favorite Cookie Recipes

Going Green (Tea Lemon Wafers) This Christmas

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A different kind of Christmas cookie.

A different kind of Christmas cookie.

 

You have to love a book that invites you to bake a different cookie every day in the lead up to Christmas.

Indulging in a different, freshly baked treat every day? What could be better?

That’s just the premise of “Cookie Advent Cookbook” (Chronicle Books), of which I received a review copy. The cookbook is by Virginia Van Vynckt and Barbara Grunes, two authors who are avowed cookie lovers.

Kids will love the cover of the book, depicting a Christmas tree laden with 24 ornaments. Lift up the flap on each ornament to uncover a tiny illustration of the “cookie of the day.”

The cookies are standard classics for the most part, such as “Swedish Thumbprints,” “Candy Cane Cookies,” and “Pistachio Cranberry Biscotti.”

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I gravitated toward one of the slightly more unusual ones, “Green Tea Lemon Wafers.” These are a breeze to make because the flour, sugar, egg and butter get cooked on the stovetop in a saucepan.

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Introducing Cookies & Beer — Really!

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Would you like a cookie with your beer?

Would you like a cookie with your beer?

 

If you’re like me and usually associate drinking beer with noshing on salty, savory or spicy foods, then you’re in for a delightful surprise with “Cookies & Beer” (Andrews McMeel).

The fun little book, of which I received a review copy, is by Jonathan Bender, a Kansas City-based journalist and founder of Recommended Daily, a site devoted to local food news.

Bender solicited cookie recipes from chefs around the country. With each, he’s paired a specific beer, and tells you his reasoning behind his picks. It will definitely make you see beer — and cookies — in a new light.

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Sugar and Spice, And Apricot-Ginger Cookies That Are Oh-So-Nice

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Start your ovens, people. It's cookie time.

Start your ovens, people. It’s cookie time.

 

Say good-bye to turkey, and hello to cookies.

With Thanksgiving over, it’s now the serious start of cookie baking season.

What better treat to get you in the mood, too, than “Big Chewy Apricot and Ginger Cookies”?

Nothing says winter holidays quite like the fragrance of cinnamon, ginger and molasses wafting from the kitchen. And this cookie has ginger in spades. Three kinds: ground, fresh, and crystallized. It’s ideal for a ginger fanatic like myself.

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Prepare Yourself For Guittard’s Luscious Chocolate Banana Blondies

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Brownies? Or blondies? Whatever you call them, they are the bomb!

Brownies? Or blondies? Whatever you call them, they are the bomb!

 

What’s in a name? Well, would you believe these are blondies?

In my world, just by appearance alone, these are brownies.

But in the first cookbook by Burlingame’s bean-to-bar chocolatier Guittard, these are indeed blondies. “Chocolate Banana Blondies” to be exact.

No matter how you refer to them, you will be calling them ravishingly good after one bite.

“Guittard Chocolate Cookbook” (Chronicle Books) was written by Amy Guittard. We should all be so lucky as to have born into a chocolate dynasty. Her great-great-grandfather founded the Guittard Chocolate Company in 1868. It is America’s oldest continuously family-run chocolate company.

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You probably know its baking products from store shelves. If you’re a See’s Candies fan, you also know Guittard because it supplies the chocolate that goes into all those homespun bonbons.

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Prepare to Drool Over Food 52’s Cream Cheese Cookies

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Perfect with a cup of tea or coffee, these cookies are deceptively rich and chewy.

Perfect with a cup of tea or coffee, these cookies are deceptively rich and chewy.

 

Cream cheese.

Just say those two words and I immediately perk up.

So creamy, thick, and oh-so-spreadable. It’s tangy, yet still mild enough to smear on just about anything in need of a little decadence.

So, when I spied the recipe for “Cream Cheese Cookies,” it gave me the perfect excuse to buy a brick.

It’s one of 60 recipes you’ll find in the new “Food52 Baking” (Ten Speed Press). It’s, of course, by the editors of Food52, the online cooking resource, and kitchen and home shop, founded by Amanda Hesser, formerly of the New York Times, and Merrill Stubbs in 2009.

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All the recipes have been curated by Hesser and Stubbs, who have culled home-spun favorites, the types of baked goods that don’t require special equipment or days to make. They are the types of treats you don’t have to talk yourself into making, and ones that you are sure to make again and again. Think “Yogurt Biscuits,” “Honey Pecan Cake,” and “Nectarine Slump.” For good measure, there are a couple of savories, too, such as “Black Pepper Popovers with Chives and Parmesan” and “Basil Onion Cornbread.”

Stubbs writes in the book that her mother got this cookie recipe at a Tupperware party in the 1970s.

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