100 Cookies by Sarah Kieffer

The Food 52 Baking Club featured this book in November, and it was surprisingly hard to get a copy of the book, it was so popular.  The author has a long standing blog, The Vanilla Bean Baking Blog, and while this is not her first cookbook, and a number of the recipes are available on line, apparently cookbooks are going like hot cakes in the pandemic.  When we finally got our copy, I could see why.  The cookies pack a punch, and the technique of making large cookies, the size of ones that you might buy in a bakery, and banging them mid-cooking to get them to collapse and ripple, is something you might not think that you need to do, but in the absence of going out to shop and not having an impulse cookie at a bakery or with a meal out, it turns out these fill that void--and give a few away, and you only have a couple left, so it is not as deadly for the waistline as it could be.  I highly recommend this, or at least trying out a recipe or two from her web site.  The Neapolitan cookies are so intensely flavored by will cry.  The oatmeal cookies and the peanut butter cookies are delicious.  The Creme Brulee cheesecake bars are a little slice of a restaurant dessert.  The sesame cookies are also delicious.