I AM A COOKIE NERD. I geek out about cookies. As a consequence, I never bake a recipe only once—I bake it again and again, striving to make each batch better than the last. When challenged to create a new cookie, I pour over the possibilities and sweat the details. It is not unusual for me to get to near-breakdown territory. That’s when I go to bed early. When I wake up, I know what I want the cookie to be. I probably should go easier on myself, but this internal cookie-creating drive of mine is relentless. Even with years of cookie baking behind me, I am still on a quest to discover new ideas, more efficient processes, and better outcomes. I can’t help it. I love cookies.
I didn’t become a cookie nerd overnight. This obsession has built up gradually over the years, unfolding into a lifelong commitment to perfecting one of my favorite things to bake—and eat.
When I was a little girl, I munched on windmills, dipped Chips Ahoy in milk, and reached for anything labeled “angel food” or “devil’s food.” When my mother chilled a batch of pecan-flecked dough to make her nut horns, I would sneak into the kitchen, open the refrigerator, and sneak out with a chunk of dough, the cold, buttery contraband melting on my tongue. Like most parents, mine tried to limit my cookie intake, which only made me want them more. Even today, my weakness for milk chocolate Milanos is very real. I can inhale a whole stack of the glorious wafer cookies in one sitting.
Yet it wasn’t until I started making cookies that this puppy love turned serious. I fell into baking partially because I needed a creative outlet. I have always lived on the right side of my brain, the artsy side. Ask anyone who has worked with me: I routinely make leaps from one idea to another, and I don’t always take time to fill in the gaps explaining how I got there. My brain fires away like one big jazz riff after another, a characteristic that runs in my family. When he was young, my father was a jazz musician who played the upright bass and accordion. My brother followed my dad’s lead by learning to play the piano, trying to emulate greats like Count Basie. Growing up, we would go as a family to Rick’s American Café in Chicago to hear Tito Puente and Mongo Santamaría. With their riffs and scatting, these Latin jazz stars were the kings of improvisation. Their brains seemed to be wired the same way as mine.
My million-ideas-a-minute brain is one of the reasons that I was perpetually grounded while growing up. Stuck at home, I found my way into the kitchen. Everything about cooking fascinated me. My mother probably felt that my interest in all things kitchen related could be a way to harness my boundless energy and keep me out of trouble. So for Hanukkah when I was thirteen, my parents bestowed a KitchenAid mixer on me. Immediately, this new powerful piece of equipment became my instrument of choice. While my brother practiced the piano, I performed solo in the kitchen, one off-the-cuff baking project after another.
Cookies were prime territory for experimentation. Their malleable dough gave me plenty of options for shaping and portioning. They were also sturdy and forgiving in a way that delicate
genoise cakes were not. As I worked away, I never read recipes. I am dyslexic. Reading while baking has always been challenging for me. To compensate, I would look at the list of ingredients in a book, glance at the picture, and crank up the mixer. It’s a funny thing. People think of pastry chefs as sticklers for rules and science—and rules and science are good. Yet while I was teaching myself how to bake, I unintentionally broke a lot of rules. In the process, I learned the things that really mattered.
After high school, I instinctively knew that the kitchen was where I was destined to spend my career, but in those days, college had to come first. So I headed north to Madison to attend the University of Wisconsin. But rather than get into campus life I cooked. My old roommate, Diana Dahl—an earlier riser than me in those days—still remembers how I would crawl out of bed to make her breakfast (bagel sandwiches were my specialty)—and then head back to bed. But friends like Diana aside, I felt completely out of place. One day while walking to campus, I saw a bus that was leaving for Chicago. It seemed to have a magnetic pull on my body, and before my brain had quite computed what had happened, I had put myself on the bus. When my parents came home that night, they found me sitting in the living room.
“What are you doing?” they asked. I said I was done with college. I was going to go to culinary school. They looked at me. They looked at each other. And then they shrugged, accepting the inevitable. “Okay.” That weekend, we went to Madison to pack up my belongings. Soon after, I was enrolled in the culinary arts program at Kendall College.
My whole life I had cooked, but I didn’t know why you made certain things in certain ways. At school, I wanted to fill in my gaps of knowledge and learn the technique that lay behind the recipes. These were the early years of Chicago’s culinary renaissance. After graduating from Kendall, I trained under Judy Contino, the pastry chef at Ambria, which was one of Chicago’s best restaurants at the time. Judy taught me discipline and gave me a foundation in pastry—and to this day I am eternally grateful to her for mentoring me. At Ambria, Judy showed me how to make pâte à choux, pie dough, cakes, custard—and so much more. Her formula for hot fudge is still the one I rely upon today. She also makes some of the best thumbprint cookies in town at her bakery, Bittersweet. I continued to hone my craft under chefs such as Charlie Trotter and Erwin Dreschler, learning more as I went. Meanwhile, as I started to develop my own style, childhood memories and nostalgia began to play prominent roles in my creations. With this angle, cookies became incredibly important. Everybody has a cookie memory, whether it comes from Grandma, Nabisco, the neighbor down the street, or your grade-school bake sale. My goal then—and now—has been to take the ordinary cookie memory and make it extraordinary.
Tapping into memories can be risky. If you serve a cookie that is supposed to take customers back to childhood, it better be the best version of that cookie that they have ever had. Trust me: they will tell you if you fall short. I learned this lesson during my first big pastry-chef break at Marché. With Michael Kornick running the kitchen, the restaurant was so cool—the hardest reservation to score in town—and the dining room was filled every night. I knew I was capable of making an impact with my desserts, but I had a lot to prove. A week into the job, the general manager, Tom Powers, made a comment about my chocolate chip cookies. I could tell that they had fallen short of his expectations. At first this made me angry, and then it fired me up. I vowed to not only make the best chocolate chip cookies Tom had ever tasted but also to produce the best cookie plate in the whole city. Tom had no idea what he had unleashed, but as a consequence of a passing remark, he became one of my most important cookie evaluators.
Some pastry chefs are into
mignardise, the little pretty cakes and sweets that finish a meal. They’re nice, but they’re not me. Since my time at Marché, I have been a true believer in the importance of having a cookie plate on a dessert menu. It is the ultimate sign of generosity. I put one on the menu when I followed Michael Kornick (my mentor in all matters of running a restaurant) to be the pastry chef at MK, the restaurant he left Marché to open, and I will always serve one at Hot Chocolate, my restaurant in Chicago’s Bucktown
neighborhood. My idea behind Hot Chocolate was to offer not only dessert but also a full menu as imagined by a pastry chef. We have a phenomenal burger—and we make the bun that comes with it. And we go all out on desserts. Since we opened in 2005, cookies have been an integral component of the restaurant’s identity.
To make a good cookie plate, you need variety. I load up a plate with a mix of flavors and textures, methods and madness—a few drop cookies, a fruit cookie, a chocolate cookie, a nut cookie. It is essential that a cookie have texture. It can be the crisp bite that gives way to a melt-in-your-mouth consistency of a shortbread cookie, the crunch of hot fudge that has oozed out and solidified on the outside of rugelach, the chewy quality of a coconut macaroon, the way the surface of a meringue shatters when you bite into it. Texture also comes from temperature change. I serve sandwich cookies chilled so the frosting slowly softens on your tongue. A balance of flavors is crucial, too. Sugar draws out flavor, but too much can be overwhelming. That’s where salt and vanilla extract come into play—they counter the sweetness and balance the flavor. Contrasting ingredients, like smoked almonds paired with orange blossom water, also balance flavor and create interest.
I learned early on that to be a great chef, you have to know what the person next to you is doing. So as I was learning the craft of pastry, I kept an eye on the savory side of the kitchen. I watched how line cooks reached for a variety of salts, how they deglazed pans with wine, how they always had an arsenal of sauces ready to go. I borrowed all of these tricks to create desserts with impact. Today, I accentuate flavor in cookies by using both kosher and sea salt. I use beer, lambic, and wine in my preserves for an underlying note of acidity, and I also have my own lineup of “mother sauces.” From there, I mix and match. You would be surprised how well a splash of porter can enrich hot fudge or caramel sauce. I also pay attention to seasonal shifts. Spring is here only after I’ve made strawberry
rhubarb rugelach. Summer can’t end without me macerating a bucket of raspberries for jam. With everything I produce, I go for a handmade look. Slight variations in size and shape give cookies textural interest and separate them from cookies stamped out by a machine. There is perfection in imperfection.
The irony that a pastry chef who started baking without reading recipes is now sharing actual, hard-earned, tested, retested, and edited cookie recipes with you has not been lost on me. But it did affect the way I developed recipes and structured this book. To create recipes, you have to have a foundation of technique. After years of baking cookies—and countless miles walked in kitchen clogs between mixers and ovens and dishwashers—I know what works. I love how each of my cookies looks and tastes. However, I also appreciate that there are a lot of people like me who will choose to go about things in their own way. With this book, I want to not only give you recipes but also arm you with a foundation in technique to empower you to riff on them.
The chapters are divided into categories of cookies so that you can immerse yourself in each type. In some cases, a chapter builds on itself in difficulty. For instance, the shortbread chapter includes two basic recipes for shortbread dough. The same chapter shows how to turn a basic shortbread dough into a multiflavored, layered creation. And if you’ve mastered shortbread and are looking for something more, the sandwich cookie chapter uses the same technique for rolling and baking cookies and also provides an array of buttery frostings to fill them. In recipes with multiple steps, I give options for finishing the cookies in both simple and complex ways. Throughout the book, I also offer techniques that go beyond cookie making, such as how to roll out dough, cook custard, or make jam.
But recipes are also just guides. I have my preferences, and you have yours. My favorite kind of almond is smoked, but I don’t mind if you prefer them unsmoked. If I call for milk chocolate, it’s perfectly okay for you to use dark, if that’s what you like. When it makes sense to do so, I point out base recipes, the formulas that offer ideal jumping-off points for cookie experimentation. For detailed descriptions of ingredients, tools, and techniques I use throughout the book, review the sections
My Cookie Pantry,
Tools of the Trade and
Tricks of the Trade. Especially important are the sections on
salt,
sugars,
measuring ingredients,
creaming butter and sugar, and
chilling dough.
Like serving a cookie plate, making cookies is a generous act. Bake a few batches, eat a few (or several), and you will still have plenty to share. Give them away to family, friends, coworkers, or the neighbor down the street who offered to watch the dog. Use them to score a hot date. (It works …) All these years of cookie baking later, I still love watching as customers take their first bite into one of my creations, especially if they are the type that says, “I’m not a dessert person.” Oh, yeah? Eat a cookie instead, I tell them. The best part is watching as smiles spread across their faces.
Baking from this book will inevitably leave you with an extra cup of frosting, a bit of fig paste, some chopped brittle, or a scrap of shortbread dough. I never, ever throw these gems away. Embrace the extras. Get creative. Make my recipes your own. Roll out all the extra bits of dough, sprinkle them with brittle, cut out funky shapes, and you have a whole new creation.
It’s okay if you make some mistakes in the process. Life—for me, at least—is like a buffet of cookies. Some are crispy, some are gooey, some are burnt, some I still can’t make. They may not be perfect—and that’s a good thing. I will still take a bite out of each one.
