Best-Ever Cookies

Rating:
Summary: Excellent recipes for gifts
Review: I love to bake cookies and have won blue ribbons at the Del Mar Fair here in San Diego. There are many new recipes in this book to try and new ideas for Christmas gifts. I make cookie jars and fill them for gifts. The pictures are great and the recipes easy to follow. Perhaps with all these new recipes I will find a good entry for the fair. I look forward to trying many of the recipes.

Rating:
Summary: Nestle Toll House Best Ever Cookies
Review: Oh boy is this a dangerous book to have on hand if you are planning on dieting! The cookie recipes in this book just sound delicious - almost every recipe sounds worth baking (I have only made one recipe so far and it came out great). There are a many pictures but they put several cookie pictures on one page, there is not a picture next to each recipe. There is a chapter on brownies, a chapter for christmas cookies, to name a couple - just page after page of mouth-watering cookie recipes using some new twists on old favorites as well as including the traditional favorites. There is also a bunch of recipes for things other than cookies - some pies, breads, etc. I can tell that this is going to become one of those tried and true favorite books that you always refer to when you are looking for that perfect recipe - easy to prepare and always tastes wonderful.

Rating:
Summary: Nice collection, but too much pumpkin!
Review: There's nothing actually wrong with the cookie recipes in the book. However, they're hardly what I'd consider the all-time greatest cookie recipes ever, anywhere. The book is a big promotional piece for Nestle products -- I suppose that explains the presence of more pumpkin recipes than anyone could ever use. Also, the brandy snap recipe is line-for-line identical to the one in _The Joy of Cooking_, so I wonder where else some of the recipes originally came from. I didn't buy this for myself, and I'm glad that I didn't -- I have better things to spend my money on.