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Cookie Craft

by Valerie Peterson & Janice Fryer

Review
This is a beautifully bound book full of color pictures of beautifully decorated cookies. It's giving me tons of great ideas for the holidays. There are also a lot of helpful hints--(e.g., how to keep your cookie cutters from rusting, how to roll out the dough to a consistant thickness) as well as detailed instructions for really cool party favors, centerpieces -- all made from cookies. The instructions break it down really simply, so it looks doable too. This is going to be the holiday book of choice for this year!
P. Brown (Amazon.com)

Book Description
Elaborately decorated cookies fill the shelves of high-end bakery cases, tempting shoppers with bright colors and whimsical shapes. The cookies are beautiful, but buying them in a bakery can be shockingly expensive, and their flavor often doesn’t live up to their appearance. Now home bakers can have their pretty cookies and enjoy eating them too!

Thanks to the clear instructions and practical methods developed by authors Valerie Peterson and Janice Fryer, amateur cookie crafters can achieve bakery-quality design and homemade fresh taste. Cookie Craft gives readers access to the entire world of decorated cookies, beginning with an inspirational gallery of 150 colorful cookies guaranteed to start those creative juices flowing.

The authors go on to discuss ingredients, supplies, equipment and technique. They include four delicious recipes for rolled cookie doughs (Traditional Sugar, Chocolate, Nutty, and Gingerbread) that provide perfect blank canvases for decorating, and, of course, their recipe for versatile Royal Icing.

In the most important section, they share the design techniques accumulated and perfected during hundreds of afternoons spent crafting thousands of cookies. Cookie crafters will learn how to pipe, flood, and sugar their cookies, how to design color palettes that work with every season, how to make cookies stand up in fun 3-D structures, and much more!

About the Author
Valerie Peterson is a writer with over fifteen years of experience working with cookbooks. She grew up in Yonkers, New York, where her second favorite toy was her Easy-Bake Oven. She now lives in Manhattan. Janice Fryer is a Pastry Arts graduate of the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City. A California native and a New Yorker at heart, she lives in Brooklyn with a crazy cat and an even crazier dog. Keeping them from eating her creations is always a lively challenge.