Greenspan - Dories Cookies

Copyright 2016 by Dorie Greenspan

Photographs 2016 by Davide Luciano and Claudia Ficca

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from

this book, write to or to

Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Greenspan, Dorie, author.

Title: Dories cookies / Dorie Greenspan.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2016]

Identifiers: LCCN 2015042719 (print) | LCCN 2016000912 (ebook) | ISBN 9780547614847 (paper over board) | ISBN 9780547614854 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Cookies. | LCGFT: Cookbooks.

Classification: LCC TX772 .G764 2016 (print) | LCC TX772 (ebook) |

DDC641.86/54dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015042719

Book design by Melissa Lotfy

v3.1016

acknowledgments

With this book, I can look back at almost fifteen years of working with two extraordinary people, people who are not just the best at what they do, but are the best at being friends: David Black, my agent, and Rux Martin, my editor. I wish every writer a team as good as this oneit makes all the difference in the world to have great people at your side, and they have been the greatest. Everything I do is better because of them.

And every recipe I do is better because of Mary Dodd. When I say that a recipe works, I say it with confidence, because after Ive created and tested it, Mary runs it through its paces. This is our second book together, and I never want to do another without her.

Once again, a bushel of thanks to Judith Sutton, who copyedited Cookies, as well as ten of my other books, for her ability to soul-search a recipe. No one does this work with more skill than Judith, no one cares about it more and no one is luckier than I to have worked with her for so long.

It is beyond a pleasure to thank Davide Luciano and Claudia Ficca for the bold beauty of this book. Davide, the photographer, and Claudia, the food stylist, are a wildly creative, dynamic, talented couple and a joy to work with. The day they walked into my former cookie shop, Beurre & Sel, I knew wed work together some day; I just couldnt have imagined that their work would be so exceptional. And thanks to Cindi Gasparre, who assisted Claudia, and made the best-looking World Peace Cookies ever, and to my friend Ellen Madere, whose eye I always trust.

Special thanks to Laurie Woodward, the founder, and Julie Schaeffer and Stephanie Whitten, the backbones of Tuesdays with Dorie, the online baking club. I love you and all the TWDers, and have from the start, which is now almost a decade ago. Your enthusiasm always inspires me.

I am so fortunate to have worked again with Carrie Bachman, whose expertise in public relations is matched only by her exceedingly good humor. And thanks to HMH for adding Brittany Edwards, Jessica Gilo and Brad Parsons to the team. Once again, HMH has surrounded me with star people: Melissa Lotfy, who designed this amazing-looking book; Jacinta Monniere, the best-ever typist; Jamie Selzer, Eugenie Delaney and Chloe Foster, who saw the book through production; Jill Lazer, who worked with the printer to ensure that it was beautiful; and Sarah Kwak, for making it all run smoothly.

A cookie jar full of cookies, mostly chocolate, to Linling Tao, for her smart and generous counsel and for being a great cookie-tasting companion. And limitless thanks to Pierre Herm, my friend and mentor in all things sweet. Merci also to the many people who helped make Beurre & Sel so special.

As youll soon read, Beurre & Sel was a cookie boutique that I started with my son, Joshua, whos called himself a cookie monster from just about the first day he could speak. His love of cookies hasnt diminished all these years later. Id say I love him more for it, but it would be impossible to love him any more than I do. I am lucky to be able to once again close, as I have eleven times before, with love to him and to his father, my indescribably wonderful husband, Michael.

introduction

Hearing I was working on a cookie book, everyone who knew me said the same thing: Of course you are. Cookies and I have been pals forever.

I come from a family of cookie lovers. I married into a cookie-loving family, and I created one of my own. Michael, my husband, will polish off a plate of cookies and proclaim, as though hes Superman keeping the planet safe, Done! That temptations out of the way! Our son, Joshuas, Twitter bio is: C is for Cookie. As for me, Ive been known to get up in the middle of the night because Ive invented a new cookie in my sleep. (Yes, I bake what I dream and sometimes its pretty great. The Classic Jammer is the blue-ribbon winner in that category.)

My friends were right: Of course I was writing a cookie bookits something Ive wanted to do since I started writing cookbooks twenty-five years ago.

Not that I havent already written a lot about cookies, probably enough to fill an armload of books. Ive never counted, but its likely that by now Ive got at least three hundred cookie recipes to my name: recipes I dreamed; recipes I made up in the light of day; recipes I begged for and those that came to me as gifts; recipes I discovered in places near and far-flung; and recipes that re-created memories. Joshua claims that cookies are memories, and I often bake to make memories real again.

With so many recipes behind me, the question was, how many could there be ahead? Heres what I found out: If you think about cookies night and day for three yearswhich is what I did when writing this bookyou realize that the cookie-verse is infinite. The only thing that can stop the dream machine is a deadline, and I got to mine, but not before Id put a trio of purple stars, my code for book it, next to more than 160 recipes. The bar for three purple stars was high. To earn it, a recipe had to be exciting enough to make me want to bake it again and again, and to make me think that it would be intriguing enough for you to want to do the same.

There was something else, and its at the heart of why I write: Whatever I work on, I want it to make me stretch. I want to learn new things and I want to be able to pass them along to you. With this book, I wanted to get a fresh look at cookies, to see what they could be when, along with butter, sugar, eggs and flour, I added curiosity. I wanted to see if the cookies would stretch with me.