sugar

Pecan Pie

This pie was legend in my ex's family. His grandmother Irene had made it for years and once she'd entered the State Fair of Texas pecan pie contest, she won it for 7 years straight. The only reason she stopped winning, they told me, was because she stopped entering.

That's a good enough reason to make this pie. It's been proven over generations, and even for the seal of approval from a big pecan state. The pecan state, as far as I'm concerned.

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Chocolate Chip Cookies

The first time I made these chocolate chip cookies was when I first bought my copy of Cookies and Brownies. That was nearly ten years ago, and I was in pastry school at the time. I'd been a longtime user of the standard Toll House Cookie recipe, and I remember being really surprised and happy with the variations in this book. In fact, the book falls open to the chocolate chip cookie recipe, it's so worn, water-stained and annotated.

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Basic Butter Cookies

Aside from sugar cookies and shortbread, there's probably a no more simple cookie than a butter cookie. But like those other two cookies, there are few recipes that rely more on quality ingredients than the butter cookie. Because it has so few ingredients, you can taste practically every one of them when you take a bit of this crisp, clean wafer.

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Palmiers with Orange Flower Water

I had a last-minute request for cookies recently – and I’d already used up the extra cookie dough logs in the freezer. I was stuck, and needed an elegant sweet with ingredients I had on hand. Granted, not everyone has puff pastry on hand!

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