CHAPTER 4

COOKIE JAR CONTENDERS

COOKIE JAR COOKIES ARE THE HUB OF ANY HOME BAKER’S RECIPE box. In the Midwest, they’re especially key during those long, cold months when it just feels right to fire up the oven on a weekday afternoon, and for those days year-round when you just have the urge to bake but don’t want a long-term commitment or an unholy mess. These cookies are happy baking of the highest order.

Cookies destined for the jar have several defining characteristics. We want scooping or slicing or maybe a bit of patting into their final form, but no painstaking shaping, filling, or sandwiching. Minimal dishes, please. They need to be sturdy enough to stack, with ingredients allowing for casual counter storage over several days.

The very best cookie jar cookies start life as a recipe destined for one’s own in-house consumption, and then soon must be made again and again for sharing and bringing along to locations far from home. And of course, making it generally impossible to have just one.