Cookies for Grown-ups
Photos by Frank Anzalone
Cookie-love is forever and yet for all the remembrances it evokes, our favorite childhood cookie is not always what we want. Even Proust lived on more than madeleines.
Our tastes change. As adults, we’re allowed to say “no” to milk, choosing instead a cup of good coffee or tea, a glass of wine, an icy cocktail or a stein of what’s on tap. Kelly Cooper knows this. She also knows how to concoct delicious, handheld treats—sweet or savory—to go with those libations.
Yet many of her most inspired cookies are built on memories. Her grandmother taught her to bake in California’s orchard-rich Santa Clara Valley, where apricots, figs, almonds and berries were abundant. Her sweet cookies brim with these and other fresh flavors, enhanced by surprise grown-up ingredients, such as Gruyère or Grand Marnier®. Unusual additions are carefully chosen to draw out the essential flavors of a cookie while adding another layer of pleasure to eating it. You may not be able to imagine precisely the favor fresh thyme does chocolate until you’ve sampled the cookie called Dark Desire.
Her savory cookies are also amazing. No solo baker invented the piquant cookie, but leading culinary writers are beginning to note that no one creates cocktail cookies better than Kelly Cooper does! Indeed, a bite of her Antipasto cookie (featuring bits of Italian salami and cheese) or Redolent (in which specks of roasted red pepper dance with slivered almonds) will likely convince you to bake for your next cocktail party.
Her whimsical cookies are for adults not only because each is carefully paired with a drink but because they’re deliciously suited for the discerning palette. We’re talking hearty breakfast cookies with dashes of maple syrup and bacon, manly game-time cookies that incorporate Slim Jims™ and late-late-night cookies to stir the senses. For any occasion, Kelly Cooper knows just how to mix beloved, familiar flavors with enlivening, new ones—and that’s the true secret of successful sophistication.
“Kelly Cooper’s Cookies for Grown-ups is bold and quirky, savory yes, but sweet, too, and full of surprises. Her creations pair with cocktails and wine; one sandwiches a chocolate habanero after-kick between orange-vanilla layers, another links pear and blue cheese.”
— Gael Greene, InsatiableCritic.com
“Ms. Cooper’s inventive names and unique flavor combinations beckon us to dive into her book and begin baking. Her recipes are a map to a baking adventure as rewarding as eating the little treasures at its end.”
— Nancy Olson, Pastry Chef, Gramercy Tavern, New York City
“Kelly Cooper isn’t the first baker to come up with savory cookies but she might do it best, for example, in kebab cookies or in one that combines the flavors of pesto. Her sweet cookies also dazzle taste buds with unexpected flavors: chili in a chocolate-hazelnut confection or pumpkin seeds in a spice cookie. The proof is in the baking, and the eating.”
— Sylvia Carter, ex-Newsday columnist, dining guide, Raleigh/Durham
“Baking cookies isn’t known as the manliest thing to do in the kitchen but with the flavor combinations that Kelly Cooper has put together, Sundays at my house are now all about football, beer and . . . grown-up cookies!”
— Chris Milano, Foodie Adventures, San Francisco
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