cookie recipes

The Good Cookie: Over 250 Delicious Recipes from Simple to Sublime
$34.95
Chapter headings ureadable. Table of contents poor and takes you to chapters only. Recipes great once you find them..

The Ultimate Shortcut Cookie Book: 745 Scrumptious Recipes That Start with Refrigerated Cookie Dough, Cake Mix, Brownie Mix or Ready-to-Eat Cereal
$24.99
This is the only cookie recipe book you will ever need. Each of the 745 recipes begin with a packaged product. Then, the author adds this and/or that to create original and outstanding products. Save yourself a lot of time and effort this holiday season and begin with this book.

Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar: 100 Dairy-Free Recipes for Everyone's Favorite Treats
$17.95
This book is a great resource for vegan cookies. Cookies! That are vegan! That's awesome. And there are very cool, original, and delicious ingredient combinations. The sweet wine cookies with sesame seeds are awesome! The Mexican hot chocolate cookies are awesome! The pine nut cookies are awesome! The photographs in this book are mouth-wateringly awesome! And another exciting aspect is that it's perfectly doable to get cookies looking as beautiful as the ones in the pictures.

A big plus for me in this book is the successful balance of ingredients you already have in your pantry, ingredients you can get at a regular grocery store, fun ingredients for treats and parties (like different sugars, flours, extracts, wines, seeds, etc.) and expensive ingredients for an even more special treat.

What bugs me is that the cookies don't actually taste that amazing. It's not always worth it to get those special ingredients to use on these. A huge part of it for me is that almost all of these call for canola oil where a non-vegan recipe would call for butter and/or shortening. Canola oil by itself just doesn't taste nearly as good as earth balance! If you're worried about cookies tasting too "vegan" and basically too much like earth balance / margarine instead of butter to nonvegans, use half earth balance, half oil, or half earth balance, half 100% vegetable shortening (unflavored, I mean, unlike the earth balance) or whatever. And as an experienced vegan baker, my cookies usually only taste "too vegan" to grumpy non-vegans eating shortbread (AKA butter) cookies, in which earth balance is the main ingredient. If there's chocolate or peanut butter or another strong flavor, the earth balance will just taste rich and flaky.

I'm sure that many people will appreciate that the oil makes these cookies healthier or lower in fat or whatever. I personally want a gourmet vegan cookie book to make delicious, rich, decadent cookies, not to be healthy! I would have appreciated a better balance of these goals.

Overall, definitely worth it. If you're as bothered as I am by the canola oil, it's not a big deal to switch it out for earth balance (though I would've appreciate that being in the book itself). The recipes are fun and there's something for every skill level.

Also, this book is WAY better than the Joy of Vegan Baking.

LU Cookies Shortbread, Scottish Recipe, 4.41-Ounce Boxes (Pack of 6)
$21.23
These shortbread cookies are amazing. They are made of only 4 simple ingredients (wheat flour, butter, sugar, and salt), and they taste heavenly. If you made these cookies yourself, at home, you would use the same ingredients. There is nothing artificial added.

Besides all of that, they are crispy, very satisfying and not too sweet. My grandchildren love them as much as I do. If you like shortbread, you will love these cookies. If you haven't tried shortbread cookies, I suggest you give these a try and start with the best, right from the Scottish Highlands.