Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Unlike a lot of the reviews already posted here, I was not already a Dorie fan when I purchased this book. I had heard of her and noticed this book was getting a lot of press in all the foodie sources I follow, and as a lover of cookies, I preordered the book. For some reason, I had assumed that it would be more like a "cookie bible"... a source of standard, well loved cookies from all over the world. Not at all! Dorie's Cookies is more like a Senior Thesis on cookies- like Dorie sat around in her kitchen trying out recipes that turn traditional cookie making on it's head. The chapter on Cocktail Cookies was really intriguing to me, and since Thanksgiving was coming up, I thought if I tried out some of those recipes they'd be great at the appetizer table. So far, I've tried 4 recipes from the book. Frankly, I've found all the recipes a bit fussy and sort of delicate. I'm used to baking things like Tollhouse Cookies, where my big secret is to double the chocolate chips and cram tons of other things in there to change it up, like pretzels or corn flakes and no matter what I do to them I can't ruin them. So I found the recipes I tried here a bit more precious and exacting than I was used to. I started with the Sesame Sea Salt Cookies, which were kind of like a pie crust where butter was cut into the flour. I found I needed to add 2T more butter to get the dough to come together properly, and if you accidentally leave the dough for any time more than 1 hour in the freezer, you will not be able to cut it without getting cracked cookies. That said, they turned out amazing and were devoured from everyone at our Thanksgiving party, from my 8 year year old to the grandparents. They are not salty, not sweet, tiny and dainty and the entire batch fit in my smallest Tupperware container. I then made the Puffed Grain and Miso Cookies. These didn't work out at all and we ended up throwing these out without bringing them to the party. I bought a ton of new ingredients that I had to search out from 3 different locations for these cookies- puffed rice, goji berries, puffed barley, and brown rice syrup. Perhaps it was the brand of miso or rice syrup that I used but the flavor of these was just too strong. My kids immediately hated them, my husband, who was drinking a beer at the time, started out liking them with his beer but after a few also found the flavor just too much. Then, because I needed to have some chocolate represented, I made the famous World Peace Cookie. In the intro to this recipe Dorie tells you the dough is kind of fussy, and she was right. Yes, the flavor was wonderful- super deep and lingering chocolate, but cutting the cookies from the logs was a challenge and next time I just might make this dough into a simple drop cookie and see what happens. A few days later, I made the Snow Topped Brownie Drops which was fairly easy and super delicious. However, the picture shows gorgeous bright white cookies and as thickly as we rolled our cookies in confectioner's sugar, our cookies did not look like that. Our sugar had melted into a pretty ghostly, thin covering. Still worth eating and making again. So of the 4 cookies I made, 1 was a complete dud, and 2 were pretty fussy to make, and 1 came out slightly visually disappointing. I still give this book 5 stars because I find that rather than find the Ultimate Snickerdoodle recipe, I'd rather flip through this book and find something completely new and surprising. A lot of the recipes in this book make relatively small batches of small, dainty cookies. So it's a bit of jumping through hoops to get like 25 cookies, as opposed to 1 bowl and a few minutes of mixing time to get 4 dozen Tollhouse cookies that you can just slop onto the sheets after no freezing time. To me, this is more about the experience of making and experimenting than it is about churning out a huge batch of the old standard, reliable recipe. It's like baking an interesting recipe for a chic dinner party rather than mass quantities of something expected for the school bake sale. I'm plotting what I will make next and that anticipation is part of the pleasure of this book. Finally, I am seeing a lot of people critiquing the book's layout and I find it doesn't bother me at all. I love seeing a full page picture of the cookie I am making. To me, it's part of the pleasure of browsing through this beautiful book. I don't find it such an inconvenience to have to turn the page while making the cookie- it's not the hardest thing to do.