Cookie Craft: From Baking to Luster Dust, Designs and Techniques for Creative Cookie Occasions »

Valerie Peterson is a writer with over fifteen years of experience working with cookbooks. She grew up in Yonkers, New York, where her second favorite toy was her Easy-Bake Oven.

Janice Fryer is a Pastry Arts graduate of the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City. A California native and a New Yorker at heart, she lives with a crazy cat and an even crazier dog. Keeping them from eating her creations is always a lively challenge.

Elaborately decorated cookies fill the shelves of high-end bakery cases, tempting shoppers with bright colors and whimsical shapes. The cookies are beautiful, but buying them in a bakery can be shockingly expensive, and their flavor often doesn’t live up to their appearance. Now home bakers can have their pretty cookies and enjoy eating them too!

Thanks to the clear instructions and practical methods developed by authors Valerie Peterson and Janice Fryer, amateur cookie crafters can achieve bakery-quality design and homemade fresh taste. Cookie Craft gives readers access to the entire world of decorated cookies, beginning with an inspirational gallery of 150 colorful cookies guaranteed to start those creative juices flowing.

The authors go on to discuss ingredients, supplies, equipment and technique. They include four delicious recipes for rolled cookie doughs (Traditional Sugar, Chocolate, Nutty, and Gingerbread) that provide perfect blank canvases for decorating, and, of course, their recipe for versatile Royal Icing.

In the most important section, they share the design techniques accumulated and perfected during hundreds of afternoons spent crafting thousands of cookies. Cookie crafters will learn how to pipe, flood, and sugar their cookies, how to design color palettes that work with every season, how to make cookies stand up in fun 3-D structures, and much more!