Category Archives: Favorite Cookie Recipes

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.

GuittardCookbook

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.

Food52Baking

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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Chocolate Chunk Cookies With — Wait For It — Chicharrones

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Chocolate chunk cookies -- hiding a wealth of chicharrones.

Chocolate chunk cookies — hiding a wealth of chicharrones.

Chocolate chunk cookies studded with bacon? Yawn. Been there. Ate that.

But have your teeth ever sunk into “Dark Chocolate Chicharron Cookies”?

Nope, didn’t think so.

I know mine sure hadn’t until I spied the recipe for them in the new cookbook, “Eat Mexico: Recipes From Mexico City’s Streets, Markets & Fondas” (Kyle Books), of which I received a review copy.

The cookbook is by Lesley Tellez, a New York City culinary guide and creator of the blog, The Mija Chronicles, who immersed herself in Mexican cooking when she lived in Mexico City for four years. The beautiful photos are by my former San Jose Mercury News colleague, Penny De Los Santos.

The book includes recipes for favorite Mexican street food such as “Roasted Poblano Pepper Tamales,” “Thickened Mexican Hot Chocolate,” and “Shrimp and Octopus Cocktail.” But where I think the book really shines is in the last chapter, “At Home,” in which Tellez incorporates Mexican flair into unexpected dishes such as “Oatmeal with Charred Poblano Peppers and Cheese” and “Stuffed Cactus Paddles,” which are reminiscent of loaded potato skins.

That last chapter is also where you’ll find this cookie recipe.

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Corny Cookies

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Baking with corn nuts. Who would have ever thunk it? Mindy Segal, that's who.

Baking with corn nuts. Who would have ever thunk it? Mindy Segal, that’s who.

 

Lugging a backpack full of textbooks in middle school, while walking to the bus stop after class, and suffering from a serious case of the munchies.

That’s truly the last time I think I’ve bought corn nuts.

Until now, that is.

Leave it to Pastry Chef Mindy Segal to get me to venture into a nearby 7-Eleven for the sole purpose of buying corn nuts.

But her recipe for “Corn Nut Cornmeal Shortbread” captivated me so much, I just had to do it.

The recipe is from her cookbook, “Cookie Love” (Ten Speed Press), of which I received a review copy.

CookieLove

A James Beard Award-winning pastry chef, Segal is the proprietor of HotChocolate Restaurant and Dessert Bar in Chicago. The book was written in conjunction with Kate Leahy, a San Francisco food writer and recipe developer.

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