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Christmas Cookies: 50 Recipes to Treasure for the Holiday Season
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Do you have a favorite Christmas cookie? Is it made of chocolate or spice? Is it an iced and decorated sugar cookie or a molasses ginger round? Or maybe it's a crisp, chocolate-covered toffee bar or a jam-filled Linzer sandwich cookie. There are so many choices!
Christmas cookies are loved for their special shapes, cheery colors, and seasonal flavors. They bring joy to our gatherings, help preserve the magic and tradition of the holiday season, and make heart-warming gifts. Christmas Cookies offers fifty wonderful recipes for holiday treats, such as light-as-air Cocoa Meringue Kisses, Chocolate Peppermint Cookies that perfectly complement a mug of hot chocolate, sweet-tart Iced Lemon Rounds, the much-beloved classic Pecan Sandies, Ginger Coins with the right amount of snap, and many, many more.
Avid holiday baker Lisa Zwirn baked hundreds of cookies to come up with these fabulous fifty recipes. There is something for everyone: treats for chocoholics, holiday shapes that children will love (that can be baked and decorated by the little ones, too), luxurious sandwich cookies, and plenty of spiced rounds, buttery wafers, and decadent bars.
Christmas Cookies will also show you how to make the most of your time in the kitchen with these useful tips and ideas:
Cookie baking guidelines for successful baking Options for freezing dough so you can bake cookies when the mood strikes Storage suggestions to help keep treats fresh for as long as possible Child-friendly recipes, such as Peanut Butter Chocolate Kisses, Chocolate Caramel Thumbprints, Gingerbread People, and Molasses Ginger Cookies, which are easy and fun for beginners The best cookies to mail and how to wrap them How to host a holiday cookie swap and cookie-decorating party
Whether you've baked Christmas cookies for years or are just starting a tradition of holiday baking, you'll find all the recipes you need right here. Christmas Cookies is an essential collection for the cookie baker, featuring color photographs, clear, detailed recipes, and irrepressible Christmas spirit.
About the Author
A food writer and recipe developer, Lisa Zwirn is a regular contributor to the Boston Globe and has written for a number of publications, including Cooking Pleasures, Intermezzo, Fine Cooking, Cooking Light, and Pastry Art & Design. She lives in Massachusetts.
16/04/2010
One Stop Shopping for Traditional Cookie Recipes
is for new as well as experienced cooks, many of the recipes are traditional and likely to be in multiple other sources on the bookshelf of any home baker. Only few of the 50 cookies were new to me.
This book would be a good choice for a new baker as it covers what I consider to be the most popular Christmas cookies (sugar cookies, gingerbread men, peanut butter cookies with Hershey kisses, linzer cookies, and rum balls to name a few). A new baker would be the most likely to benefit from the chapters on the Basics of Cookie Making, Key Ingredients for the Cookie Baker and Key Tools for the Cookie Baker which contain good basic tips that an experienced baker probably already knows.
I have listed the cookie recipes below so you can determine whether they would be new to you or not. Each chapter includes tips for making that type of cookie.
The chapter on Drop Cookies includes recipes for:
-Maple Walnut Cookies
-Brown Sugar Pecan Cookies
-Lace Cookies
-Almond Macaroons
-Iced Lemon Rounds
-Coconut Macaroons
-Cocoa Meringue Kisses
-Mexican Chocolate Snowballs
The chapter on Rolled Cookies includes recipes for:
-Cornmeal Currant Cookies
-Dutch Spice Cookies
-Sugar Cookies
-Sugar Cookies with Stained Glass
-Walnut Stars
-Gingerbread People
The chapter on Slice and Bake Cookies includes recipes for:
-Ginger Coins
-Eggnog Cookies
-Pinwheel Cookies
-Chocolate Espresso Wafers
-Pecan Sandies
-Toasted Coconut Sables
The chapter on Hand-Shaped Cookies includes recipes for:
-Pecan Butterballs
-Hazelnut Biscotti
-Cranberry Pistachio Biscotti
-Orange Poppy Seed Drops
-Molasses Ginger Cookies
-Chocolate Crinkles
-Chocolate Peppermint Cookies
-Swedish Dreams
-Viennese Crescents
-Peanut Butter Chocolate Kisses
-Italian Wine Cookies
The chapter on Filled and Sandwich Cookies includes recipes for:
-BaChocolate Almond Macaroon Sandwiches
-Chocolate Caramel Thumbprints
-Linzer Cookies
-Fig Half-Moons
The chapter on Bar Cookies includes recipes for:
-Apricot Almond Bars
-Baci Brownies
-Cranberry Swirl Cheesecake Squares
-Almond Thins
-Peanut Brittle Bars
-Chocolate Shortbread Wedges
-Sachertorte Bars
-Lemon Squares
-Toffee Bars
-Turtle Bars
The chapter on No-Bake Treats includes recipes for:
-Rocky Road Bites
-Peanut Butter Chocolate Squares
-Chocolate Hearts
-Rum Balls
Each recipe includes the projected yield (usually between 35-55 cookies) but not nutritional information.
There are two helpful lists at the back of the book (in addition to the index). The first lists recipes ahead and freeze cookie dough. There is also a list of the best cookies for mailing on page 9.
Since there seem to be conflicting opinions among other reviewers regarding the photos, I counted them (twice). 25 of the 50 cookie recipes include a color photo, and the majority of the photos are larger than half a page and give the reader a clear idea of what the finished cookie should look like.
This would be a good gift for a college student or perhaps as a housewarming gift (particularly if you add a few cookie cutters and cookie sheets).
16/11/2009
Appealing Christmas cookie book
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Lisa Zwirn's book, Christmas Cookies: 50 Recipes to Treasure for the Holiday Season, is a wonderful addition to my collection of cookbooks. This attractive, beautifully photographed cookbook is filled with recipes of delicious treats your family and friends will truly enjoy.
My family adores chocloate desserts of almost any kind, but I ventured out of the norm and tried the author's heavenly Lemon Squares. They were absoultley wonderful, full of intense flavor with a moist, tasty crust. The Coconut Macaroons, dipped in Chocolate is another delightful sweet. They were moist, chewy and very simple to create. A co-worker borrowed my cookbook and chose to make the Apricot Almond Bars. She brought these fruity, chewy almond bars into the office for everyone to enjoy and we devoured them in a day.
I've given this gem of a cookbook to several friends and family members last holiday season and I received wonderful feedback.
For the upcoming holiday season I look forward to trying numerous new recipes from Lisa Zwirn's superb cookbook. I highly recommend this appealing, well-written holiday treasure.
By: Jane from Wayland, MA
04/12/2008
Yummy and creative!
Just looking at the pictures in this book is enough to make your mouth water. Let me just tantalize you with a few of the wonderful recipes in here: Rocky Road Bites (p 126), Sacher torte Bars (p 116), Apricot Almond Bars (p 106), Chocolate Carmel Thumbprints (p 97, )Hazelnut Biscotti, Pecan Butterballs (p 70), Eggnog Cookies (p 61) and Sugar Cookies with Stained Glass (p 49).
In these tough economic times, I really appreciate a book like this. What could be nicer and more Christmasy than giving everyone a plate of your own homemade Christmas cookies?
The recipes are great! You will really like this one.
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