The Christmas Cookie Book

By Lou Seibert Pappas and Frankie Frankeny

From spicy Gingerbread to simple and elegant Biscotti, The Christmas Cookie Book offers up a mouthwatering collection of forty traditional and contemporary cookie recipes. Classics like Sugar Cookies and Spritz make an appearance alongside more modern takes on long-cherished recipes such as French Lemon Wafers and Mahogany-Iced Brown Bears. Baking expert Lou Pappas shares the enchanting history of Christmas cookies and demonstrates which are best for shipping, which are fun to bake with kids, and which make the most elegant cookie-tray displays. With tempting photographs throughout, this book is a joyous celebration of baking, giving, and most importantly, enjoying everyone's favorite Christmastime treat.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811830950
• ISBN13: 9780811830959
• Release Date: October 2000
• Publisher: Chronicle Books
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 1.0" x 1.0"
• Age Range: 13 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 8 to Postsecondary

Customer Reviews

Experienced User

I've owned this book and have baked Christmas cookies for my friends and family from it for about 6 years. I don't usually review books, but I just finished a weekend of cookie baking with my 7-year-old daughter and was thinking about how much these recipes have serve me well...and well, I thought you should know. First, I have not made some of the recipes in here, bc I'm picky about my sweets (don't like jellies and too many nuts), so I've just skipped certain recipes bc they just didn't look like my taste. I have baked the following recipes for years however: gingersnaps, sugar cookies, cardamom shortbread stars, peppernuts, pecan snowdrops, and gingerbread. I follow the recipes to a T, and my family and friends RAVE about them! I even floored my parents gourmet chef friend with the cardamom shortbread stars. He immediately went to his book of one million cookie recipes and couldn't find one he liked more. The pecan snowdrops (aka mexican wedding cakes) are my family's absolute favorite. Most of the recipes end up looking and tasting gourmet, without all the fancy ingredients; they are just the best versions of traditional cookies; great tips for serving; plenty of options and variations and the cookies are just gorgeous. I give cookies as gifts, so having a great recipe that will look beautiful and special when packaged as a gift is really important. You just can't fail with many of the recipes. Strongly recommended by me, my family, all the grandparents, all my friends and co-workers (my cookies blow other co-workers cookies out of the water EVERY YEAR! and I don't share my source ;) As for the reviewer who gave this book a one-star review after trying two recipes, I can only say: (1) I never tried making those recipes; and (2) s/he obviously tried the wrong two! tough luck.

Not perfect, but enjoyable

This is a comparatively small book, but the presentation is beautiful and the photos are elegant and lovely. Certainly it'll help to get you in the mood for holiday cooking. The only problem with the layout is that the name and description for each recipe is presented between the ingredient list and the directions. Because of this my brain keeps trying to associate each set of directions with the following list of ingredients rather than the preceding list; the only thing that keeps this from resulting in a ton of recipe mishaps is the fact that the book starts each recipe on a new page. The book includes a wonderful array of fairly traditional recipes from all over the place, although Pappas often puts her own touch on them: Springerle cookies, Lebkuchen, gingerbread, Viennese marzipan bells, sugar cookies, frosty snowmen, pecan snowdrops, gingersnaps, Florentines, Norwegian lace cookies, macadamia-white chocolate brownies, and plenty more. For the most part these recipes are pretty simple and easy; cookies don't usually take a lot of work. I only had problems with one of the recipes we tried: the embossed macadamia cookies. The dough is very dry (vanilla and butter are the only non-dry ingredients), and for a while I wondered if the dough was even going to come together as a dough; a little warning that this would be the case might have been nice. Also, the directions for flattening and decorating the cookies really didn't work very well. They said to "dip a dampened cookie press... into the bowl of sugar, then press a ball to flatten...." The idea is that it leaves behind a pattern in the dough and decorating sugar. Instead, the dampened press made the bowl of sugar clump up and stick to itself, and the sugar rarely stayed behind on the cookies. It ended up working a lot better to use the dampened press to flatten the cookies, then sprinkle colored sugar overtop. It might not have made the nice designs from the photo, but it looked better than what we started with by following the directions! The flavors worked out better than the directions--the Norwegian lace cookies are the best I've ever had, and I love those macadamia cookies. This might not be a 100% perfect cookbook, but it's a beautiful and inspiring source of Christmas cookies, and if that's what you're looking for I think you'll enjoy it!

EXCELLENT!...

I LOVE THIS BOOK! THE PHOTOGGRAPHY IS SO SIMPLE AND BEAUTIFUL AND THE RECIPES ARE SOME OF MY FAVORITES. LOU PAPPAS HAS A DELICATE PALATE THAT DOESN'T OVERPOWER THE PASTRY WITH ONE INGREDIENT. I HAVE TASTED ALMOST EVERY RECIPE SO I SHOULD KNOW!! IT IS SO GOOD I GAVE THIS TO 8 FRIENDS FOR CHRISTMAS AND THEY LOVED IT TOO.