Christmas Cookies with The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companio

Everyone has fond memories of warm cookies straight from the oven. The warmth of the cookie, the sweet taste in your mouth, I have never met someone without a favourite cookie, many of them centered around the holiday season. Lets face it, even your real estate agent will tell you to bake cookies to sell your home faster and for more money. But with hundreds of different varieties of cookies, it can be just a little daunting trying to come up with something new for your holiday gatherings and/or the yearly cookie exchange.

Never fear, The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion is here. Subtitled "The Essential Cookie Cookbook" this tome is not only full of wonderful recipes but is stuffed full of tips, diagrams, and answers to all of your cookie questions. The recipes in the collection are not simply a hodge podge of interesting cookies, these recipes were carefully researched and tested with only the best and most sought-after, the essentials, included.

The essential cookies were broken down into nine separate categories; Chocolate Chip, Sugar, Oatmeal, Molasses, Peanut Butter, Shortbread, Biscotti, Brownies and Decorated Cookies. So many different ways to bake a similar cookie required not just one or two different recipes but no less than 11 pages of recipes and tips per essential cookie type. The rest of the book is dedicated to Bars & Squares, Drop Cookies, Roll-Out Cookies, Shaped Cookies, Batter Cookies, No-Bake Cookies, The Finishing Touch and a detailed section on Ingredients.

As they did with The King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion, the book is full of information to help you along at every step. Detailed drawings demonstrate various techniques such as folding, freezing cookie dough, leveling and more. The multitude of available cooking utensils available are discussed and illustrated, there is even a step by step illustration for packaging cookies for transportation.

It is always, in my opinion, the little extras that make a cookbook great. The extras in this case are enough to justify the purchase of this cookbook, even if there were no recipes included. The incredibly detailed drawings for how to decorated cookies make it easy enough for even the beginner baker to figure out. For anyone, beginner to expert, The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion will become your Essential Cookie Cookbook.

Looking for a special cookie for your holiday gathering or cookie exchange? Don't miss the Holiday Cookie Exchange online at: http://www.1001recipes2send.com/db/detail_pageb.cgi?ID=2228

Try this favourite:

Roll-Out Sugar Cookies

Often sugar cookies are fat and soft, the cumulus clouds of cookiedom. But when you roll out the dough rather than drop it from a spoon, you reach the other extreme: thin and crisp. Make them just a bit thicker, and you