Dorie’s Cookies
by Dorie Greenspan (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; $35)

As the holidays approach, I begin scouring cookbooks and magazines (I’m old school) to pick the cookies I want to bake. This year, however, I may need to crack open just this one book. In Dorie’s Cookies, baking guru Dorie Greenspan offers 170 cookie recipes of all kinds, from the three-ingredient Gozinaki (just walnuts, honey, and sugar) to the more palate-piquing Salt-and-Pepper Sugar-and-Spice Galettes to intriguing mash-ups like Peanut Brownie Sables, with two doughs combined into one blend of peanut-chocolate goodness. There are even savory cookies, including gems like Rosemary-Parm Cookies and Chocolate-Olive Cookies. Using the book
is like having a friend in the kitchen to remind you, for instance, to leave room on the baking sheet because “these are spreaders,” or to give this advice for shaping dough logs: “Get the diameter right, and the length will follow.”

Which cookies will make the cut for my holiday assortment this year? Right now, I can guarantee that I’ll be making a batch of the Maple-Star Anise Cookies, sandwiched with a spiced cream-cheese frosting, as well as Dorie’s Good, Better, Best Cookies (the good: an almond-and-cinnamon spiked cookie; the better: a Biscoff Spread filling; the best: a dunk in bittersweet chocolate ganache). Probably
the bigger question is whether I’ll make a double batch of these cookies to allow me to engage in thorough taste-testing for quality control—not that any of the many recipes I’ve tried have needed it.

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