The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion: The Essential Cookie Cookbook (King Arthur Flour Cookbooks)

Drawing on the same commitment to the home-baking community that has earned them hundreds of thousands of dedicated followers, the bakers at King Arthur Flour guide you through hundreds of recipes, revealing the secrets to making your own mouthwatering cookies for any occasion.

The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion includes full chapters on drop cookies, roll-out cookies, shaped cookies, batter cookies, no-bake cookies, and bars and find a thorough overview of the essential ingredients of cookie baking, explaining the chemistry of flours and grains, leavens, sweeteners, fats, dairy products, flavorings, and the science of how these ingredients work and variations; measuring and weighing ingredients; even advice on high-altitude baking. Recipes are enhanced with sidebars providing hints, shortcuts, troubleshooting advice, and recipe lore. And each recipe is accompanied by a complete nutritional analysis. Illustrations throughout the book provide clear step-by-step instructions that take the mystery out of such baking terms as "creaming," "soft-ball stage," and "folding." Finally, a comprehensive illustrated chapter describes the essential line black & white illustrations.

The Cookie Companion is in the King Arthur tradition, which means that it's a teaching cookbook--one overflowing with tips, pointers, lore, and other compelling information. Thus, for example, the introduction to Special Roll-Out Sugar Cookies informs readers that thorough dough-rolling creates thin, snapping-crisp cookies, but roll the dough a bit thicker, and "you’ve got crunchy." Their no-detail-too-small introductory basics are greatly aided by the tour-de-force illustrations of Laura Hartman Maestro. For example, a box on bar-cookie cutting shows readers the five basic size configurations, depending on pan dimensions. Bakers who have routinely paused, knife in hand, before a pan of just-baked brownies, trying to decide how to end up with, say, 24 large squares, won't, following the illustrations, do so again. A section on cookie decoration is equally definitive, as is a final chapter on ingredients, which offers, for example, a full discussion of sugars, plus asides like "Is Splenda the Answer to Low-Calorie Baking" (maybe) and "Can I Substitute a Liquid Sweetener for a Dry One to Make My Cookies Sifter?" (sometimes, but never measurement for measurement).

With "Create-a-Cookie," a section that focuses on manipulating basic dough mixtures to make checkerboard and pinwheel cookies among others; recipes for glazes, icings, dips and finishes; illustrated equipment profiles; plus color photos that depict the cookies in all their edible glory, the book is, simply, a must-have for cookie bakers everywhere. --Arthur Boehm