Product Description

America's favorite bakers turn a fresh eye on cookies—everyone's favorite homemade treat.

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 bakers begin by singling out the "Nine Essential Cookies" and variations that reflect a variety of tastes, textures, and ingredients:

• brownies
• sugar cookies
• chocolate chip cookies
• shortbread
• oatmeal cookies
• peanut butter cookies
• molasses-ginger cookies
• biscotti
• decorated cookies

From whoopie pies to ladyfingers, it's all here in one place. 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 squares.

You'll find complete instructions for making cookie icings, fillings, and dips. You'll 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 together. You'll also learn tips on substitutions 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 baking tools you'll want to have on hand. 150 line black & white illustrations.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #134888 in Books
• Published on: 2004-11-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 536 pages

Amazon.com Review
Americans spend over $550 million annually on Oreos, some indication of our cookie infatuation. Meeting that passion head-on, The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion offers 400-plus recipes for almost every cookie under the sun--from traditional favorites like oatmeal and chocolate chip cookies (13 recipes including the soft and crisp kinds, plus 11 variations, such a Orange-Pistachio Milk Chocolate Chippers); to global treats like shortbread, tuiles, springerle, and biscotti; to all kinds of bars and soft bites such as brownies, Whoopie Pies, and Hot and Sweet Ginger Squares.

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

From Publishers Weekly
The holidays may be the only time of year when store-bought cookies just aren’t special enough to share with friends and family. Even novice bakers are willing to move beyond their comfort zone and try something festive. Now, they don’t have to go it alone. The King Arthur Flour Company, the largest educator of bakers in the world, has provided a thorough how-to on cookies that will appeal to beginners and advanced bakers alike. The company’s bakers have already won The James Beard Foundation KitchenAid Cookbook of the Year award for the King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion (2003), and now they set their sights on the cookie. The bakers have singled out eight essential cookies—chocolate chip, oatmeal, sugar, peanut butter, shortbread, molasses-ginger, brownies and biscotti—and offer both traditional and exotic recipes, as well as variations and decorating tips to allow for bursts of inspiration. Of course all baking starts with the basics, so the bakers begin by providing information on measuring, baking pans, cookie cutters, ingredients, tools and flour, and they end with a chapter on The Finishing Touch, where they dissect icing. With mouth-watering photos as motivation and drawings to offer assistance, this cookbook is a must for any serious baker. It leaves no cookie unturned.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
King Arthur Flour is the largest single educator of bakers in the world. Employee owned since 1996, the company conducts a yearly national baking class tour that has provided free baking classes to many thousands of bakers across the U.S. The company also publishes a newsletter of recipes and baking information, The Baking Sheet. The Baker's Catalogue, a wholly owned subsidiary, sponsors an online baking forum, The Baking Circle, on its parent company's Web site. The company's 2003 release, The King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion, was selected as one of the best cookbooks of the year by Food & Wine, People, and many other national publications. All the bakers at King Arthur Flour work from their 12-sided post-and-beam headquarters in Norwich, Vermont.

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Customer Reviews

Absolutely Amazing
I don't usually write reviews on things, but this was a MUST. After reading all the previous reviews I simply HAD TO HAVE this book. When I received the book I ALMOST returned it!! I was so disappointed that there was only a few pictures which although sounds childish gets me to really want to make someting. Thank god I thought twice is all I have to say. I figured if the reviews were so good I had to give it a try. Theres actually a little excerpt under the title of each recipe and it paints a picture MORE THAN AN ACTUAL PICTURE EVER COULD. I absolutely love baking and have made numerous recipes in this book and NOT ONE has failed. You should see the condition of my book however LOL.. This book does it right to EVERY EXTENT. Sometime I have doubted the recipes, but have always followed along and the cookies always come out superb even when it just looks like its not gonna work! I cant express this enough- this book is amazing and it is an excellent gift to all fellow bakers!!

Best Cookie Baking Book!
This book was recommmended by a culinary arts teacher of mine. It was packaged well & shipped in a timely manner.

Baking Cookies
Like always King Arthur does their best. This cookie book is jammed packed with all sorts of good things to eat-- cookies & bars. Well worth buying for your own recipe collection or giving as a gift.