The Great Minnesota Cookie Book: Award-Winning Recipes from the Star Tribune’s Holiday Cookie Contest

In this festive dessert cookbook, food editor Dean and food writer Nelson compile 80 recipes that were submitted to the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s holiday cookie contest over the past 15 years. The book showcases several reimagined cookies with familiar flavors, such as cinnamon bun cookies with a vanilla-almond cream cheese frosting, snowball clippers “which taste like a Mounds bar,” and candy cane sugar cookies with a peppermint icing. Readers will find cookies with bold flavors (most notably Persian crinkles made with pomegranate molasses, meringues with chocolate-balsamic sauce, and cardamom orange zest sugar cookies) as well as some they may want to steer clear of, such as red velvet whoopee pies, which call for an entire one-ounce bottle of food coloring, or the Swedish almond chocolate macaroons that have a raw egg filling. Each recipe includes an anecdote or homage paid from Tribune readers who submitted the entries (“This recipe came down from my great-grandmother”)—however, some appear to be too closely based on previously published recipes (a recipe for korova cookies is borrowed from Dorie Greenspan, but appears to only add chocolate chips rather than the original’s call to cut up one’s own chocolate). Nevertheless, this is a great book to get a baker into the holiday spirit. (Oct.)