Dear Readers,
I absolutely love baking around the Christmas holiday.
It brings up so many wonderful memories from my childhood. My grandma and I used to make cut out cookies every year and flood them with powdered sugar icing. They were absolutely hideous, but they tasted awesome. Our cookie cutters were tried and true and gifted us with stars, gingerbread men, and Christmas camels (okay, so they were supposed to be reindeer…but I did tell you that they were hideous). My grandpa would eat the ones that got a little too crispy. Every few years, I’ll make a batch of sugar cookies and flood them with powdered sugar icing. They’re still hideous, and even though they’re still enjoyed by my family and use the same recipe, to me, they don’t taste as good as the ones I made with my grandma.
These days, my mom and I are like a fine-tuned machine when it comes to making our cookies. She’ll work on dough for the molasses cookies that my dad loves while I scoop large teaspoonfuls of monster cookies onto cookie sheets. She’ll mix up the peanut butter cup cookies, while I always get stuck unwrapping all of said peanut butter cups. Baking with my mom has become another tradition and I cherish it fondly. We laugh and we talk. We’ll sneak cookies off of trays to eat while they’re still warm. While I’ve got a huge sweet tooth and the cookies are always great, baking them with my mom has become even sweeter for me.
Below you’ll find a collection of different holiday and cookie cookbooks. We’ve all got tried and true favorites, but it’s always fun to discover a new recipe to share with loved ones.
Happy Holidays and see you in December for our Annual Staff Favorite Reads of 2022!
-Julie, Communications & Outreach Librarian
As always, all summaries are courtesy of each book’s publisher.
How to Bake Everything by Mark Bittman
Available at Warren Public Library
In the most comprehensive book of its kind, Mark Bittman offers the ultimate baker’s resource. Finally, here is the simplest way to bake everything, from American favorites (Crunchy Toffee Cookies, Baked Alaska) to of-the-moment updates (Gingerbread Whoopie Pies). It explores global baking, too: Nordic ruis, New Orleans beignets, Afghan snowshoe naan. The recipes satisfy every flavor craving thanks to more than 2,000 recipes and variations: a pound cake can incorporate polenta, yogurt, ricotta, citrus, hazelnuts, ginger, and more. New bakers will appreciate Bittman’s opinionated advice on essential equipment and ingredient substitutions, plus extensive technique illustrations. The pros will find their creativity unleashed with guidance on how to adapt recipes to become vegan, incorporate new grains, improvise tarts, or create customized icebox cakes using a mix-and-match chart. Demystified, deconstructed, and debunked—baking is simpler and more flexible than you ever imagined.
The All-Purpose Baker’s Companion from the King Arthur Baking Company
Available at Warren Public Library
Comprehensive in scope, authoritative in style, and offering clear, practical, and encouraging instruction, The King Arthur Baking Company’s All-Purpose Baker’s Companion is the one book you’ll turn to every time you bake. The experts from King Arthur lead home bakers through hundreds of easy and foolproof recipes from yeast breads and sourdoughs to cakes and cookies to quick breads and brownies. Winner of the 2004 Cookbook of the Year Award by the James Beard Foundation, this dependable cookbook has been reinvigorated with new photography, recipes, and revisions to keep it relevant to today’s modern baker. Decades of research in their famous test kitchen shaped the contents of this book which includes more than 350 recipes, a completely up-to-date overview of ingredients (including gluten-free options), substitutions and variations, and troubleshooting advice. Sidebars share baking secrets and provide clear step-by-step instructions. Techniques are further explained with easy-to-follow illustrations. Now fully revised and updated, The King Arthur Baking Company’s All-Purpose Baker’s Companion is an essential kitchen tool.
Good Housekeeping Christmas Cookies
Available at Warren Public Library
Everyone loves a Christmas cookie! Here are the best of the best from Good Housekeeping: 75 delicious triple-tested holiday recipes, from Chocolate Chunk and Gingerbread Cutouts to Mint Peppermint Sticks and Razzy-Jazzy Thumbprints. Whether you’re an expert baker or an enthusiastic home cook, this treasure trove of cookies, including do-ahead tips and easy decorating and gift-wrapping ideas, will ensure that everything you make tastes—and looks—amazing.
The Good Housekeeping Christmas Cookbook
Available at Warren Public Library
Hang the stockings, deck the halls, and cook up a happy holiday with Good Housekeeping!
Brimming with more than 300 celebration-worthy recipes, sparkling decorating ideas, and suggestions for homemade (and home-baked) gifts, this sumptuous, mouthwatering collection will make the season extra merry. Featuring new recipes in every chapter, as well as holiday ideas from celebrities, plus a section on gingerbread houses, The Good Housekeeping Christmas Cookbook offers its triple-tested holiday favorites. Famous contributors, including Sting, Reese Witherspoon, and Mariah Carey, reminisce about their most memorable Christmases. With dishes ranging from Glazed Ham with Apricots and Roast Turkey with Wild Mushroom Gravy to a delicious Dulce de Leche Christmas Wreath, this book proves that when it comes to Christmas, no one does it like Good Housekeeping.
Christmas Baking by Mia Öhrn
Available on Libby
The Christmas season is a magical time—sleigh bells ringing, puffy snow flurrying, a cozy fire crackling, and wonderful aromas coming from the kitchen as families make yummy Christmas treats. Christmas Baking will make the holiday season even more magical with fun and simple recipes that are sure to become Christmas traditions in every home. Prominent Swedish pastry chef Mia Öhrn offers thirty-eight of her amazingly creative and delicious recipes for cakes, cookies, candies, truffles, cupcakes, tarts, and breads that are tasty, colorful, fun, and decorative. Learn how to build and decorate the perfect gingerbread house, create marzipan elves, make toffee sticks, ginger-flavored chocolates, a gingerbread bowl, fig pie, and decadent chocolate cake with blood oranges. Aside from the sweets, Öhrn includes recipes for a fruit and nut bread, saffron bread, and poppy crisp bread. Along with the recipes, the author provides helpful hints for choosing the best ingredients, gives you valuable baking tips and decorating ideas, and shows you how to properly preserve your finished creations. The beautiful photographs of the delightful treats and winter scenes by Ulrika Pousette make Christmas Baking a very special book filled with treats that everyone will love.
Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan
Available at Warren Public Library
Over the course of her baking career, Dorie Greenspan has created more than 300 cookie recipes. Yet she has never written a book about them—until now. To merit her “three purple stars of approval,” every cookie had to be so special that it begged to be made again and again. Cookies for every taste and occasion are here. There are company treats like Portofignos, with chocolate dough and port-soaked figs, and lunch-box Blueberry Buttermilk Pie Bars. They Might Be Breakfast Cookies are packed with goodies—raisins, dried apples, dried cranberries, and oats— while Almond Crackle Cookies have just three ingredients. There are dozens of choices for the Christmas cookie swaps, including Little Rascals (German jam sandwich cookies with walnuts), Italian Saucissons (chocolate log cookies studded with dried fruit), and Snowy-Topped Brownie Drops. And who but America’s favorite baker could devise a cookie as intriguing as Pink-Peppercorn Thumbprints or as popular as the World Peace Cookie, with its 59 million Internet fans?
The Good Housekeeping Test Kitchen Cookie Lover’s Cookbook
Available at Warren Public Library
What’s tasty and tempting enough to follow hot on the heels of Good Housekeeping’s Test Kitchen Cookbook? Yummy cookies and brownies! This superlative collection straight from the magazine’s famed Test Kitchens features 250 of the most luscious recipes ever created, along with irresistible photos. Good Housekeeping Test Kitchen Cookie Lover’s Cookbook features: Triple-tested and tasted recipes guaranteed to work in any conventional oven with any brand of ingredients, no matter what; Chapters on cookie-jar favorites, easy-to-shape cookies, brownies, blondies and bars, health-conscious cookies, and holiday cookies; Baking advice, tips, and essential techniques from the Test Kitchen pros; More than 200 color photographs show step-by-step baking and decorating techniques, as well as the finished cookies; and emergency baking substitutions, pan volumes, and other handy charts.
Taste of Home Bakeshop Favorites
Available at Warren Public Library
Taste of Home Bakeshop Favorites contains 383 delicious recipes for cakes, pies, breads, pastries, cookies, as well as seasonal baking ideas and great beverage recipes.
100 Cookies by Sarah Kieffer
Available at Warren Public Library
100 Cookies is a go-to baking book featuring 100 recipes for cookies and bars, organized into seven chapters. Chocolatey, fruity, crispy, chewy, classic, inventive—there’s a foolproof recipe for the perfect treat for everyone in this cookie recipe book. 100 Cookies introduces innovative baking techniques, includes an entire chapter dedicated to Kieffer’s “pan banging” technique that ensures crisp edges and soft centers for the most delicious cookies, and nearly every cookie dough recipe is accompanied by a photograph. Dessert recipes range from the Classic Chocolate Chip made three different ways, to bars, brownies, and blondies that reflect a wide range of flavors and global inspiration.
Nadiya Bakes by Nadiya Hussain
Available on Libby
When Nadiya Hussain, the UK’s “national treasure,” began cooking, she headed straight to the oven—which, in her home, wasn’t used for baking, but rather for storing frying pans! One day, her new husband asked her to bake him a cake and then . . . she was hooked! Baking soon became a part of her daily life. In her newest cookbook, based on her Netflix show and BBC series Nadiya Bakes, Nadiya shares more than 100 simple and achievable recipes for cakes, cookies, breads, tarts, and puddings that will become staples in your home. From Raspberry Amaretti Biscuits and Key Lime Cupcakes to Cheat’s Sourdough and Spiced Squash Strudel, Nadiya has created an ultimate baking resource for just about every baked good that will entice beginner bakers and experienced pastry makers alike.
The Cookie Collection by Brian Hart Hoffman
Available at Warren Public Library
Become a cookie connoisseur with a variety of flavors and cookie styles. From buttercream-filled sandwich cookies and berry-studded sugar cookies for summer to gingerbread and shortbread primed for the winter holidays, these recipes will see you through every season. Find all your chocolate chip-stuffed and caramel-filled favorites. With both classics and contemporary crowd-pleasers, this is the collection you’ll turn to time and time again. No matter the occasion, we’ve got you covered with cookies.
American Cookie by Anne Byrn
Available at Warren Public Library
Each of America’s little bites–cookies, candies, wafers, brittles–tells a big story, and each speaks volumes about what was going on in America when the recipes were created. In American Cookie, the New York Times bestselling author and Cake Mix Doctor Anne Byrn takes us on a journey through America’s baking history. And just like she did in American Cake, she provides an incredibly detailed historical background alongside each recipe. Because the little bites we love are more than just baked goods–they’re representations of different times in our history. Early colonists brought sugar cookies, Italian fig cookies, African benne wafers, and German gingerbread cookies. Each of the 100 recipes, from Katharine Hepburn Brownies and Democratic Tea Cakes to saltwater taffy and peanut brittle, comes with a lesson that’s both informative and enchanting.
Chocolate is Forever by Maida Heatter
Available at Warren Public Library
Maida Heatter is one of the most trusted and beloved cookbook authors of all time. Her recipes, each a modern classic, have inspired extraordinary bakers such as Dorie Greenspan, Christina Tosi, and David Lebovitz, whose foreword introduces the joy of baking with Maida to a new generation. Throughout Maida’s nearly 50-year career as a “genius” of baking (New York Times), one thing was constant: her passion for chocolate. She created hundreds of recipes for chocolate cakes, puddings, pies, cookies, and more. Now, Chocolate Is Forever collects her very best, most irresistibly chocolatey delights-including The World’s Best Hot Fudge Sauce. Developed for foolproof baking by anyone, each of these nearly 100 recipes is written with Maida’s warm but no-nonsense instructions and carries her guarantee that it will work perfectly every time. With recipes ranging from simple cupcakes and fudgy brownies to decadent flourless cakes, this book is a must-have in every chocolate-lover’s kitchen.
Salty Snacks by Cynthia Nims
Available at Warren Public Library
This collection of seventy-five recipes for veggie chips, cheese straws, toasted nuts, pita chips, herb crackers, savory cookies, and snack mixes puts a fresh, crunchy spin on homemade nibbles. So broaden your horizons beyond microwave popcorn and bagged chips to include inventive snacks like Roasted Chickpeas with Sumac, Coconut Crisps with Basil and Chiles, Salami Chips with Grainy Mustard Dip, Stilton and Walnut Pinwheels, and more. Indeed, with all the excess sodium and hidden preservatives in prepackaged foods, it’s smart as well as delicious to make your own savory bites from scratch. Nutritious offerings like Parsnip and Carrot Chips, gluten-free recipes like Cumin Lentil Crackers, and the option to customize the amount of added salt (or alternative spices and sprinklings) will appeal to snackers of every stripe. Perfect for cocktail parties, after-school snack time, or anytime you need a nosh, this collection’s easy techniques and exotic flavors are sure to delight anyone with a “salty tooth.”
The Allergen-Free Baker’s Handbook
Available at Warren Public Library
The Allergen-Free Baker’s Handbook features 100 tried-and-true recipes that are completely free of all ingredients responsible for 90 percent of food allergies, sparing bakers the all-too-common frustration of having to make unsatisfactory substitutions or rework recipes entirely. To make things even easier, energized and empathetic mom Cybele Pascal demystifies alternative foodstuffs and offers an insider’s advice about choosing safe products and sources for buying them. As the head baker for a food-allergic family, food writer Pascal shares her most in-demand treats and how to make them work without allergenic ingredients. Her collection includes a delightfully familiar array of sweets and savory goodies that are no longer off-limits, from Glazed Vanilla Scones, Cinnamon Rolls, and Lemon-Lime Squares to Chocolate Fudge Brownies, Red Velvet Cake, and every kid’s favorite: Pizza.
Decorating Cookies by Bridget Edwards
Available at Warren Public Library
Let cookie guru Bridget Edwards guide you through more than 60 delicious cookie-decorating designs for every occasion and holiday, from luscious springtime daisies to spooky spider webs to personalized birthdays. Cookie dough and royal icing recipes are included, and every iced design features easy-to-follow instructions and step-by-step photos.
Baking Magazines Available on Libby
