The holiday parties are starting, and so are the holiday cookie swaps. Sure, you could always pick up something from the bakery at the grocery store on the way, but maybe you enjoy taking the time to find a great new recipe and make it.
I am a big fan of the chocolate advent calendar; this charming cookbook has a calendar on the cover to direct you to a daily cookie recipe inside. Wow! The selection is wonderfully varied and appropriately festive. Bakers and lovers of all things Christmas will appreciate this gift, since it can come out with the ornaments every year. And who says the cookies are just for the holiday season? My love for gingerbread knows no bounds. I can’t imagine baking every day for a month, but I love reading new recipes and planning. If only next year I could get a baking elf to go with this…
We can barely keep this cookie cookbook on the shelves this season! Bakers are gaga for Greenspan’s all-cookie extravaganza. You won’t find many familiar recipes, but you’ll find all kinds of new wonders. An example: Cabin-Fever Caramel Banana Bars, shown below as baked by my friend Colleen:
photo courtesy of Colleen Conway
Here’s an oldie-but-goodie: Cooking Jewish. If you have a yearning for authentic, home-baked rugelach and other traditional Jewish treats, you’ll find great recipes here. And if you make Rabinowitz Family-style latkes for any party, I’m in. There are many reasons we try to always keep this book in stock.
Feeling wanderlust but need to stay home to stoke the homefires? You can have it all with cookbooks from famous restaurants. People line up for the crack pie and compost cookies at Milk Bar in New York, DC, and Toronto; you can recreate the magic and wow your friends and family by recreating the treats in your home kitchen. This stylish book also works well on coffee tables.
Do you have a favorite cookbook for cookies? What are you baking this holiday season (or hoping someone will bake for you)?
(If you’re feeling funny and festive, check out this post from our archive.)
Tegan Tigani, the nwbooklovers.org editor, is a bookseller at Queen Anne Book Company in Seattle. She is blessed with so many customers who bake well that she has special holiday outfits with extra room around the waist.
