2010 IACP Baking Book of the Year With recipes organized by texture! Flaky, gooey, crunchy, crispy, chewy, chunky, melt-in-your-mouth . . . Cookies are easy, enticing, and fun. Yet as the award-winning baker Alice Medrich notes, too often, home cooks cling to the recipe on the bag of chocolate chips, when so much more is possible. “What if cookies reflected our modern culinary sensibility—our spirit of adventure and passion for flavors and even our dietary concerns?” Medrich writes in her introduction to this landmark cookie cookbook, organized by texture, from crunchy to airy to chunky. An inveterate tester and master manipulator of ingredients, she draws on the world’s pantry of ingredients for such delicious riffs on the classics as airy meringues studded with cashews and chocolate chunks, palmiers (elephant’s ears) made with cardamom and caramel, and rugelach with halvah. Butter and sugar content is slashed and the flavor turned up on everything from ginger snaps to chocolate clouds. From new spins on classic recipes including chocolate-chip cookies and brownies, to delectable 2-point treats for Weight Watchers, to cookies to make with kids, this master conjurer of sweets will bring bliss to every dessert table.

Presents recipes for a wide range of cookies and brownies to suit any taste, including espresso swirl brownies, snicker doodles, and chocolate decadence cookies

Holiday Cookies is the newest addition to the Artisanal Kitchen series, adapted from Chewy, Gooey, Crispy, Crunchy, Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies (Artisan, 2010) by Alice Medrich. Holiday Cookies provides dozens of foolproof recipes for cookies, bars, and savories of all textures, from simple holiday classics like Vanilla Bean Tuiles and Great Grahams to the more decadent Caramel Cheesecake Bars and Chunky Hazelnut Meringues. There are even some delicious savories that can double as hors d’oeuvres at the holiday buffet like Crunchy Seed Cookies and Salted Peanut Toffee Cookies. Holiday Cookies, Holiday Cocktails, and Party Food, three new titles in the Artisanal Kitchen series, provide an indispensable arsenal of recipes that cover all the bases for a delicious holiday season.

A refreshing change in every respect When you are working with great ingredients, you want to keep it simple. You don’t want to blur flavor by overcomplicating. This is why Pure Dessert, from the beloved Alice Medrich, offers the simplest of recipes, using the fewest ingredients in the most interesting ways. There are no glazes, fillings, or frostings—just dessert at its purest, most elemental, and most flavorful. Alice deftly takes us places we haven’t been, using, for example, whole grains, usually reserved for breads, to bring a lovely nutty quality to cookies and strawberry shortcake. Pound cake takes on a new identity with a touch of olive oil and sherry. Unexpected cheeses make divine soufflés. Chestnut flour and walnuts virtually transform meringue. Varietal honeys and raw sugars infuse ice creams and sherbets with delectable new flavor. Inspired choices of ingredients are at the heart of this collection of entirely new recipes: sesame brittle ice cream, corn-flour tuiles with tangy sea salt and a warming bite of black pepper, honey caramels, strawberries with single-malt sabayon. To witness Alice’s idea-stream as she describes how she arrived at each combination is to instantly understand why three of her books have won Best Cookbook of the Year. She’s an experimenter, tinkerer, and sleuth, fascinated with trial and error, with the effects of small changes in recipes, exploring combinations tirelessly and making remarkable discoveries. Does cold cream or hot cream do a better job coaxing out the flavor of mint leaves or rose petals? Why is it that dusting a warm brownie with spices gives it an enticing aromatic nose, whereas putting the spice in the batter blurs the chocolate flavor? Do cooked strawberries or raw make for the better sorbet? Loaded with advice and novel suggestions, with great recipes and eye-catching, full-color photographs that show off these simple, straightforward desserts, Pure Dessert is an education and a revelation. Thank you, Alice!

These days, people are accustomed to seeing chocolate labeled 54%, 61%, or 72% on grocery store shelves, but some bakers are still confused by what the labeling means and how to use it. In Seriously Bitter Sweet, Alice Medrich presents 150 meticulously tested, seriously delicious recipes—both savory and sweet—for a wide range of percentage chocolates. “Chocolate notes” appear alongside, so readers can further adapt any recipe using the percentage chocolate on hand. The book is a complete revision of Alice’s 2003 Bittersweet, which was named the 2004 IACP Cookbook of the Year. Since 2003, the world of chocolate has grown exponentially and terms like “bittersweet” and “semisweet” no longer suffice as chocolatiers everywhere are making chocolates that are labeled with specific percentages of cocoa.Alice clearly outlines the qualities of different chocolates as she explains how to cook with them. With tricks, techniques, and answers to every chocolate question, Seriously Bitter Sweet will appeal to a whole new audience of chocolate lovers

Presents easy-to-prepare dessert recipes for pies, puddings, tarts, cakes, and cookies, with discussions on ingredients, equipment, and food preparation.

Originally published: New York, NY: Warner Books, 1990.