COOKIES AND KINDNESS

Can this baked treat save the world?

“I feel like the baking evangelist,” Dorie Greenspan says. “I want everybody in the kitchen, baking cookies and sharing.”

After all, cookies are made for sharing: they’re fun to bake and always come in batches. And as Greenspan points out, if we know something makes people happy, why don’t we do it more often?

“It’s really a wobbly time. I can barely read the news anymore and I was thinking, ‘Well, what can you count on?’” she says. “When times get tough, there are two things that will always be good and will always be solid: cookies and kindness. So I’ve started a campaign called Cookies and Kindness.”

Each month, Greenspan posts a different recipe on her website (doriegreenspan.com/cookieskindness). Two-Bite One-Chip Cookies from her 12th cookbook, Dorie’s Cookies (Rux Martin Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), kicked the campaign off. All are welcome to play along simply by baking cookies, surprising someone with them, and using the tag #cookiesandkindness on social media.

“I have always loved cookies. I think in part it’s the fun of having something that’s all your own. As a cookie eater, you get to play with your food. A cookie is all yours,” she says.

She estimates that she already had at least 300 cookie recipes to her name before writing Dorie’s Cookies. However, through focusing solely on the format, she soon realized “that the cookie-verse is infinite.”

You’d be hard-pressed to disagree after perusing Greenspan’s comprehensive offering: brownies, bars, breakups and biscotti; cookies for every day, any day; cookies for weekends, holidays and other celebrations; the Beurre & Sel collection (a cookie boutique she ran in New York with her son, Joshua); and savoury “cocktail” cookies.

“Cookies are endlessly fascinating. I could have gone on forever because once you start playing with cookies you realize what the possibilities are,” Greenspan says.