Cookiemania: 100 Irresistible Recipes for Cookiemaniacs

This is no armchair cookbook but a delectable cookie jar served up by the co-founders of Cookiemania, a Chicago-based store and mail-order company. Elegant offerings like florentines, brandy snaps, lemon-nut cookies, spicy butter thins and raspberry meringues are appropriate for a genteel afternoon tea. Recipes for butterscotch refrigerator cookies, caramel bars, mocha-pecan cookies, pumpkin cookie bars and apricot chews evoke nothing fancier than thoughts of a sheet of warm, fragrant cookies straight from the oven. For those of the persuasion that anything good is better with chocolate, there are chocolate-syrup brownies, chocolate-banana drops with chocolate-fudge frosting, and cream cheese-chocolate chip cookies, as well as an array of puffs, snowballs, munchies and sprinkles spotlighting that popular ingredient. Even a cook's best friend earns its own treat: Alfie and Archie's dog biscuits, formed with a dog-bone-shaped cookie cutter. Illustrations not seen by PW. (September)