Become a Christmas Cookie Pro With ‘The Art of the Cookie’
Yahoo Food’s Cookbook of the Week is The Art of the Cookie: Baking Up Inspiration by the Dozen by Shelly Kaldunski (Weldon Owen), a cooking teacher, food stylist, and cookbook author specializing in sweets.
The cover of The Art of the Cookie: Baking Up Inspiration by the Dozen. (Weldon Owen)
Cookies mean different things to different people. For some, they’re the perfect little indulgence, just right for an afternoon pick-me-up or a midnight snack. For others, cookies hark back to time spent in the kitchen with family and friends. For Shelly Kaldunski, a former restaurant pastry chef, cookies are “little works of edible art.” Not every cookie falls under the fine art category, of course. Kaldunski is talking about gleaming and glittering twinkle stars, bright and colorful gingerbread trees, snowy white meringue spirals, and the dozens of other beauties found in her new book, The Art of the Cookie.
Baking and even decorating cookies is a year-round affair, but it takes center stage at holiday time, and while The Art of the Cookie is a resource for all seasons and occasions, it’s a bit of a holiday baking bible. There are plenty of non-Christmas recipes, including mini chocolate pretzels and jam-topped pinwheels, but if you’re headed to a cookie exchange or planning to bake edible gifts this year, The Art of the Cookie is filled with inspiration and, perhaps more importantly, provides lots of essential instruction.
Cookies this pretty “delight the senses well before they are devoured,” writes Kaldunski. But they can also be intimidating, which is something she took to heart while writing her book.
“You don’t need a painter’s hand or endless hours to create stunning cookies,” Kaldunski insists. All you really need are solid, easy-to-follow instructions and some handy visual aids, which is where Kaldunski comes in. Her recipes feature step-by-step instructions to walk you through the decorating process, and the more complicated ones feature illustrations to highlight specific techniques.
Jam swirls (Photograph: Maren Caruso)
Kaldunski’s jam swirls are a perfect example. Look at these adorable treats and it’s a little hard to picture just how they get their labyrinthlike decoration, but three simple line illustrations included alongside the recipe make the process completely doable. Kaldunski’s clear how-to language also helps.
For a book with such complicated-looking cookies, it has a surprisingly simple setup. Kaldunski starts with five basic cookie recipes — vanilla sugar cookies, lemon-buttermilk cookies, brown sugar cookies, chocolate sugar cookies, and gingerbread cookies — and then uses those as the “canvas for a wealth of decorating ideas,” including alphabet cookies and chocolate sweethearts.
Gingerbread trees (Photograph: Maren Caruso)
The second half of the book introduces “Modern Classics,” which do require their own unique recipes, but even these are on the simple side. Most have relatively short ingredient lists and instructions that are anything but intimidating. There are some sub-recipes in the back, but only a few and they’re used sparingly, so this is not the type of cookbook that requires constantly flipping around to find other recipes or having to make multiple recipes just to wind up with a couple dozen pretty cookies.
You’ll also find what Kaldunski calls the “Cookie Artist’s Toolkit,” which is an overview of cookie-decorating ingredients that range from basic (coconut and nuts) to more specialized (luster dust and sanding sugar). The list is short, so shopping and expenses are kept to a minimum. It also means you can do a lot with a little. Kaldunski’s equipment list takes a similarly minimalist approach. She doesn’t drill down to every piece of baking equipment you need but instead focuses on specific pieces that will help you make and embellish the gorgeous cookies in her book.
Visit Yahoo Food throughout the week for recipes from The Art of the Cookie (Weldon Owen).
Check out other books from Yahoo Food’s Cookbook of the Week:
‘Simply Nigella’ by Nigella Lawson
‘Grandbaby Cakes’ by Jocelyn Delk Adams
‘Oh! What a Treat’ by Sandra Denneler
