Big Fat Cookies

Homebaked cookies generally tend to come in one size, as the average recipe calls for dough to be shaped into rounded tablespoonfuls when dropped on the baking sheet to produce a cookie that is about 2 1/2 inches across. Cookies sold in coffee shops and bakeries tend to be much larger and much more visually impressive, but dropping triple the amount of dough onto your baking sheet isn’t necessarily a reliable way to bake jumbo cookies. Big Fat Cookiesis a cookbook dedicated to super-sized cookies, and it enables you to put out the same kind of impressive bakery-style cookies (with a homebaked taste, of course) from your own kitchen.

The book starts off with the usual discussion of ingredients and cookie-making techniques that so many cookie cookbooks do, but also spends time talking about how large cookies – apart from “standard” cookies – can be formed. It then gets into the recipes. Easy to follow, most of the recipes make only a few cookies (approx 1 dozen, for the mot part) because of their size. That said, it is worth remembering that these are not small-batch recipes where you can take advantage of the small number of cookies baked to cut back on your cookie intake; each delicious cookie is going to have at least twice the number of calories as a regular cookie, and more than that if there’s a filling involved. The book has many illustrations to accompany the various recipes, all of which look very tempting and actually inspired me to try a few decorating techniques with smaller cookies, as well.