I Love Desserts: Cookie Craft

the appetizer:

Learn ingenious tricks for making cookies with Cookie Craft by Valerie Peterson and Janice Fryer, including recipes for Easter and Spring Cookies and for Halloween Cookies; and decorating techniques like Using Fondant.

I Love Desserts

Cookie Craft
From Baking to Luster Dust

Designs and Techniques for Creative Cookie Occasions

by Valerie Peterson and Janice Fryer

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Elaborately decorated cookies fill the shelves of high-end bakery cases, tempting shoppers with their bright colors and whimsical designs throughout the year. Where once only a cake would do, cookies are becoming the treat of choice at weddings, children's parties, and just about any other celebration imaginable.

Valerie Peterson and Janice Fryer have been baking and decorating cookies ever since their mothers first let them lick the spoon, and they're ready to share that accumulated wisdom with bakers everywhere. In Cookie Craft, they have created the must-have guide to crafting beautifully designed, hand-decorated, and, most importantly, delicious cookies at home.

Cookie Craft introduces readers to the entire world of decorated cookies, beginning with an inspirational gallery of 150 colorful designs for every season, holiday, and occasion, guaranteed to start those creative juices flowing. Having whetted readers' appetites, Peterson and Fryer go on to discuss ingredients, supplies, equipment, and technique. They include four delicious recipes for rolled cookie doughs (Traditional Sugar, Chocolate, Nutty, and Gingerbread) that provide the perfect blank canvases for decorating, using their own versatile Royal Icing.

In their section on design techniques, Peterson arid Fryer share the wisdom they have accumulated during hundreds of afternoons spent grafting thousands of cookies. Cookie crafters will learn how to pipe, flood, and sugar their cookies and how to design color palettes that work for every season. For the more adventurous, they also show readers how to construct fun, three-dimensional cookie structures, such as baby-carriage-shaped shower favors, haunted houses for Halloween, or Christmas sleighs.

The cookies baked and the adornments applied, Peterson and Fryer conclude with hints on freezing, wrapping and storing, and safely shipping the finished products. They also share their ideas on planning cookie craft parties for kids and bake sales.

With full-color photographs and step-by-step instructions, Cookie Craft will inspire and instruct both the expert and beginning home baker, and show them both how to have their pretty cookies and eat them, too!

About the Authors

Valerie Peterson is a writer with more than 15 years of experience working with cookbooks. She grew up in Yonkers, N.Y., where her second favorite toy was her Easy-Bake Oven. She lives in Manhattan. Janice Fryer is a Pastry Arts graduate of the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City. A California native and a New Yorker at heart, she lives in Brooklyn with a crazy cat and an even crazier dog. Keeping them from eating her creations is always a lively challenge.

Cookie Craft
From Baking to Luster Dust
Designs and Techniques for Creative Cookie Occasions
by Valerie Peterson and Janice Fryer
Storey Publishing 2007
$18.95; hardcover; 160 pages
ISBN: 978-1-58017-694-1
ISBN: 1580176941
Information provided by the publisher.

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