As an awkward ninth-grader, Sarah Kieffer coped with teen angst by trying out cookie recipes after school. It wasn’t just the sugar highs and compliments that motivated her. “I felt content with the process of taking initiative, setting out to do something, and keeping at it even when it wasn’t working, or was tired of it,” she writes in the introduction to “100 Cookies: The Baking Book for Every Kitchen” (Chronicle, $27.50).
Cookie-baking is remarkably therapeutic, as many of us have (re)discovered during these long pandemic months. It’s no wonder that Kieffer’s fetching volume has been flying off shelves since it was released last fall.
A self-taught baker, Kieffer honed her craft working as a barista to pay her way through college. The pastry case was bare, and as the shop’s only employee, she was tasked with replenishing it, thus reigniting her pubescent cookie-baking obsession. She continued to bake in coffeehouses and bakeries around Minneapolis while sharing her expertise on her award-winning website, The Vanilla Bean Blog, and in national publications.
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Several years ago, she wrote about a method she came up with: tap a pan of chocolate chip cookies multiple times as they bake to create crisp, rippled edges while leaving the center “soft and full of melty chocolate.” The New York Times picked it up and the recipe went viral. She devotes an entire chapter to “pan-banging cookies.” I tried this technique on Toasted Sesame Cookies and it worked like a charm.
Other chapters cover classics, brownies and blondies, fruit-filled treats, pie bars and cake bars (try the Red Wine Cherry Cheesecake Swirl Bars), and more challenging endeavors like Macarons with Rhubarb Caramel Filling. A once-aspiring poet, Kieffer’s lyrical prose makes the reading as pleasurable as the eating.
What is it that cookies have over fancy cakes and tarts?
“Instead of pomp and flash,” writes Keiffer, “they offer us warm blankets and cozy slippers.”
Put simply: “Cookies are home.”
Susan Puckett is a cookbook author and former food editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Follow her at susanpuckett.com.
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