Customer Reviews

Big Fat Cookies

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

What I love about this book is it creates big, soft, and delicious cookies. The sweetness is just right, so that it never feels like you're being overpowered by sweetness. If you bake it right, it turns out quite chewy on the outside and very soft and gooey in the middle. Surprisingly enough, I have baked ALL her recipes, from natural cookies to sandwich cookies to dipped cookies and they were all delicious! I have tried cooking with The All-American Cookie Book and BIG FAT COOKIES book had far less fats and oils and more pure ingredients - butter, sugar, eggs, and flour. The other recipes from different cookbooks were more complicated and seemed to detach from the home-made style of fresh ingredients.
I started out as a beginning cook with absolutely no experience in baking cookies, and a month later using her cookbook, I am able to make awesome cookies that have been a hit between my friends, family, and relatives.
This is a great book!

Every cookie I've made from this book has been incredibly yummy and gotten rave reviews. I have only two complaints that caused me to give 4 stars rather than 5. First, though the pictures are very good, not every cookie is shown -- and I like to have some idea of what they're supposed to look like, especially with unfamiliar recipes. And second, some of the cookies are supposed to be like sandwiches -- two cookies with a filling between -- and these are not nearly so easy to achieve as the book seems to imply. It's really hard (at least for me!) to get two cookies to be exactly the same size and shape! However, those two small things aside, the recipes are excellent, and the book also has a couple things many cookbooks don't, such as summaries of prep and cooking time at the bottom of each page, and storage instructions for every recipe.

Elinor Kivans's new cookie book is filled with new ideas and variations on old favorites. Check out the Celebration Sugar Cookies on page 76 -- the snowman decorations are wonderfully fanciful. The book has crisp graphics and great photos, which are always a motivation to try something new. I also like how easy the recipies are. The recipies don't require any fancy equipment or a lot of time. This book is great for both the novice and experienced baker.

Elinor Klivans has once again created a cookbook that is practical and beautiful. "Big Fat Cookies" is full of impress-your-friends cookies that are easy to make. We made Chocolate Chip-Stuffed Cookies and Fudge-Filled Chocolate-Chip Cookie Sandwiches (pictured on the cover) for my toddler's recent birthday party and were besieged with compliments and requests for recipes from the parents of very happy two year olds. Once you master making these oversized cookies (and Klivans makes it easy for a non-baker like me to do so), you'll never go back to little ones.

"Big Fat Cookies" contains a good selection of recipes--an entire chapter each of "big chewy cookies," "colossal crisp cookies," and "two-fisted sandwich cookies." Whether you're looking for lemon whoopie pies, toasted coconut washboards, oatmeal trailblazers, toffee crunch cookie brittle, or chocolate chip-stuffed cookies, you'll find it in here. While you'll certainly find recipes that will please those who only eat "standard" cookie flavors, most of these recipes are inventive and unusual in at least some small way or another. For instance, the oatmeal cookies rolled in trail mix before baking (yum!) or the butterscotch "blondies" that are turned into drop cookies and have melted chocolate swirled into them.

As usual for a Chronicle book the production quality is quite high. Photos are elegant and tasty-looking. Layout is clear and easy to read. The recipe steps are simple and non-confusing.

The book includes notes on ingredients, tools, storing cookies, mailing cookies, and so on. Rather than providing hundreds of recipes of reasonable quality as many cookbooks choose to do, it concentrates on a more limited selection of higher-quality recipes. It certainly provides you with new ideas, however, from the cranberry-walnut cream cheese cookie mounds to the lemon butter crumb cookies and peppermint patties. Every recipe we've made from this cookbook has been delightful--particularly those butterscotch blondie cookies!

What fun these cookies are to make as well as eat! Most are easy to put together and hard to give away. Like Klivans' other books, there is a lot of extra helpful information about equipment and ingredients. A must for every cook, new or experienced!

I have always loved baking, but with this book in my kitchen, baking is wonderful because of all the praise I receive from friends, family, and co-workers. I have tried many of the recipes and all of them have been delicious. Elinor has great tips for many of the recipes and gives a good introduction at the beginning of the book with general tips about making great cookies (ingredients, utensils, etc). I have put away the chocolate chip cookie recipe from my mom because the recipes in this book are just too easy and perfect!

You won't be disappointed with this book - go ahead and try all the recipes for big, fat, DELICIOUS cookies!

So far I have tried 3 recipes from this book. All have come out quite delicious and have been a big hit with everyone I've shared the cookies with. The black and white cookies especially were bakery quality. I'm really looking forward to making more!

The recipes are easy to follow and for the most part contain pretty simple ingredients. The batch sizes are also reasonable (usually about 1 dozen really big chewy soft cookies) In addition its really nice looking book with great photographs. It would make a great gift or addition to your own kitchen.

I have been baking from this book since the day I received it as a gift. I then gave it to everyone on my list this holiday season. The ginger cookies alone are worth the price. Plus, the pictures are great!

by Judy Bart Kancigor, author of Cooking Jewish: 532 Great Recipes from the Rabinowitz Family

From The Orange County Register
February 10, 2005

Go ahead. See if you can say "big fat cookie" and not smile. I dare you.

I asked Elinor Klivans, noted Maine pastry chef and author of "Big Fat Cookies" (Chronicle Books) how she got the idea for her beautifully photographed, irresistibly cookie-licious cookbook.

"I was working on my last book ("Fearless Baking") and someone asked, "What do you think you want to do for your next book?" and without thinking about it, `big fat cookies' came out of my mouth, and I thought, yes, that's the one I should do."

With Valentine's Day only a kiss away, what could be better than giving some big fat cookies to the one you love, but try to choose just one recipe from this stunning, new book. I double dare you.

If chocolate be the food of love, bake on. For the Chocolate Chip-Stuffed Cookies, two mammoth chocolate chip cookies are stuffed with even more chips for a "now, why didn't I think of that?" chocoholic's dream. And how does Klivans produce a cookie firm enough to stand up to this chocolate overload? "I use all brown sugar rather than the usual granulated and brown sugar combination, plus cold eggs and only slightly softened butter, rather than the usual room temperature," she revealed.

Not enough chocolate for you? Try the Chocolate Chip Whoppers, Chocolate Chunk Mountains or my personal favorites, Big City (read New Yawk, of cawse) Black and Whites.

Were you the kid that loved to make mud pies? Then the Chocolate-Covered Chocolate Chip Cookies" (aka "Mud Balls") are for you. "You bake these wonderful chocolate chip cookies, and when they're just cool enough to handle but still quite warm, you squish them into balls and refrigerate them," Klivans explained. "Then for the shiny chocolate coating, instead of tempering the chocolate, which is really tricky to do, you just melt chocolate with a little oil and dip the cookie balls in that mixture and refrigerate until firm. They look like giant truffles. For parties I even cut them into quarters."

Oh, did I mention - these are really big cookies! "Most of the cookies call for 1/4 cup of batter each," she noted. "I like to use an ice cream scoop. Then the cookies are all uniform and you just go down the line."

Because of their size, these cookies need to be baked longer, so most call for a lower temperature than you may be used to. "Cookies are a quick-baking item, and there's only a short interval between a perfectly baked cookie and an overbaked one," she cautioned. "And because of their high sugar content, they burn easily, so check the bottoms with a spatula to be sure they're not getting too dark Better to risk breaking one up than to ruin the whole batch. You can always eat that broken cookie!"

Why not bake some Heart-Shaped Butter Shortbread cookies for your Valentine. "These are sturdy cookies that hold their shape," said Klivans. "Cornstarch, unlike flour, contains no gluten and makes for a more tender cookie. As an option, add a teeny drop of red food coloring to a little of the glaze to turn it pink. Then drizzle the pink glaze over the white for a marbleized effect. I don't like to fuss with decorations for hours. These are so easy and really pretty too."