Martha Stewart’s Cookies

I don’t like Martha Stewart, but I do recognize a certain brilliance behind her self-stylized empire. In need of a good cookie cookbook—and there aren’t many—I came across the recently published Martha Stewart’s Cookies. Once I got my hands on its thick, glossy full-color pages, I realized why it spent more than two months on the New York Times Best Seller list. With 175 recipes, from the basic to the complex, from all-American to exotic, the book is one of the best-organized and most fun that I’ve used. The recipes are smartly organized by cookie texture—rich and dense to light and delicate and everything in between. The highlight: the table of contents is a collage of actual cookie photos. You can find what you want to bake without knowing what it’s called or just pick a recipe based on how enticing it looks. There are large photos of each cookie throughout the book—food porn at its salacious best. I’ve discovered that you don’t have to be brilliant to make a delicious cookie—you just have to follow a good recipe—and you still get all of the credit. That’s brilliant.