title: Completely Cookies: Quick and Easy Recipes for More Than 500 Delicious Cookies
author:  Leslie Weiner 
description: Weiner and Albright ( Mostly Muffins ) continue their alliterative cookbook series with an entry for bakers who like their cookies straight, no chaser. True, they offer sensible advice on conversion, baking and mailing, but the bulk of the text is devoted to more than 50 cookie recipes. (Not present are cloying introductions, food-inspired poetry or portraits of the cook-as-artist.) Recipes are divided into cookie types--bar, drop, refrigerator and rolled--and feature both standards and exotica. Updates of tried-and-true favorites include date-nut pinwheels, while white chocolate, raspberry and coffee turn up in many of the more modern entries (apricot white-chocolate-chunk cookies, framboise brownies). A chapter called "Create Your Own Cookies" defeats gastronomic boredom. Instructions throughout are straightforward and simple. For the cookie lover, the book is the equivalent of a Swiss army knife--portable and multi-purpose. Illustrations not seen by PW. <br />Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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  **The ingredients list for most cookies includes** butter, sugar, flour, and
  eggs, and usually a leavener such as
  
  
  baking soda or powder. Any number of mix-ins can
  
  
  alter flavors and textures—think spices, extracts,
  
  
  zests, nuts, chocolate chips, and such. To produce
  
  
  cookies that are light and delicate, however, the key is
  
  
  often in taking away ingredients, not adding. The
  
  
  meringue is a prime example: It consists almost
  
  
  entirely of sugar and egg whites—no butter flour, or
  
  
  leaveners—that are whipped into cloudlike puffs
  
  
  before baking. Similarly, the batters for tuiles and
  
  
  brandy snaps rely on very little flour and no leavener and our hazelnut
  cookies achieve their ethe-real
  
  
  texture from a complete absence of butter. Each of the
  
  
  delightful cookies in this chapter is proof that less can
  
  
  indeed add up to more.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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