The Cookies & Cups Cookbook: 125+ sweet & savory recipes reminding you to Always Eat Dessert First
4.5/5
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About this ebook
Shelly Jaronsky has a problem. She’s an addict. Of the buttercream variety.
“Chronicling my life in sugar” has been Shelly’s motto since the inception of her insanely frequented dessert blog, Cookies & Cups. With recipes ranging from the deliciously decadent (her S’mores Fudge Bars will make you seriously reconsider everything you thought you knew about baked goods) to the deceptively simple (her Favorite Chocolate Chip Cookie will become an instant staple in your baking repertoire), The Cookies & Cups Cookbook truly has something for everyone, from the cooking novice to the seasoned chef.
Now you can bring Shelly’s signature style into your own kitchen with more than 125 no-fail recipes, including some reader-approved favorites and a special bonus section dedicated to the quick and savory side of cooking. Authored in the witty, intimate style of the blog that draws more than three million monthly page views and a social following of more than seven hundred thousand fans, The Cookies & Cups Cookbook is the go-to source for all things flavorful, accessible, and irresistibly tasty.
Shelly Jaronsky
Since Shelly Jaronsky launched her beloved website Cookies & Cups in 2008, her innovative and delightful recipes have established her as one of the premier dessert blogs in the virtual space. The Cookies & Cups Cookbook is her first book. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and four sons.
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Reviews for The Cookies & Cups Cookbook
9 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This cookbook has vibrant, enticing photos and simple ingredients. I appreciate the variety- cookies, pies, brownies, icing, and more. It even includes a small section of simple family foods towards the end. A lot to choose from and a lot to try over time. I haven't made any of the recipes yet (reason review is a 4) but I've bookmarked quite a few!
Book preview
The Cookies & Cups Cookbook - Shelly Jaronsky
TO MY BOYS,
Chris, Christopher, David, Jake, and Max,
THE LOVES OF MY LIFE
CONTENTS
Introduction: I’m gonna talk a little about me right now
My Rules (or Lack Thereof) in the Kitchen: Let’s talk about my rules for being rule-less
Part One: Dessert First
{1} So You Think You Can Bake? These are the recipes you need to nail
My Favorite Chocolate Chip Cookies
Classic Cut-Out Sugar Cookies
The Fudgiest Brownies
Gooey Marshmallow Krispie Treats
Vanilla Bean Snickerdoodles
Brown Sugar Blondies
The Essential Vanilla Cake
Perfect Buttercream
All-Butter Pie Dough
{2} Eat Cake for Breakfast! And other remedies for the morning sweet tooth
Brown Sugar Cinnamon Swirl Bread
Buttermilk
Perfect Waffles
The Essential Blueberry Streusel Muffin
Banana Bread Pancakes
OMG Pull-Apart Praline Bread
Ice Cream–Soaked French Toast
Pumpkin Crumb Cake
Pumpkin Pie Spice
Honey and Brown Sugar Baked Oatmeal
Cereal Squares
Toffee-Speckled Banana Bread
Badass Biscuits with Salted Strawberry-Honey Butter
Salted Strawberry-Honey Butter
Self-Rising Flour
Cranberry-Orange Scones
No-Bake Granola Truffles
{3} Cookies: A balanced diet is a cookie in each hand
Soft Brown Sugar Cookies
Light Brown Sugar
S’mores Cookies
Glazed Lemmies
Cookies and Cream Cookies
Coconut Macaroon Thumbprint Cookies
Salty Browned Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies
Crispy Chewy Oatmeal Cookies
Marbled Chocolate-Hazelnut Cookies
Chock-Full of White Chocolate Cookies
Flourless Chocolate Cookies with Flaked Sea Salt
Key Lime Pie Cookies
Pound Cake Cookies
Peanut Butter Cup–Filled Brownie Cookie Sandwiches
Sparkling Apple Cider Meltaway Cookies
{4} Brownies and Bars: My happiness resides in a 9 x 13 pan
Kitchen Sink Blondies
Strawberries and Cream Bars
Tuxedo Brownies
Gooey Salted Caramel Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars
Blueberry Cobbler Cheesecake Bars with a Macadamia Nut Crust
S’mores Fudge Squares
Confetti White Chocolate Bars
Junk Food Marshmallow Squares
Salted Caramel Apple Butter Bars
No-Bake Mint Chocolate Bars
Praline Bars
Birthday Cake Krispie Treats
Creamy Coconut-Lime Squares
Chocolate-Hazelnut Brownies
No-Bake Chocolate-Filled Oat Squares
Pretzel Bark
Simple No-Bake Snack Squares
{5} Cake: It’s always the answer, no matter what the question
Confetti Cake
S’mores Cake
Billionaire Cookie Dough Cake
Egg-Free Vanilla Cupcakes
Hot Fudge Sundae Cake
Salted Caramel Cupcakes
Supersoft Coconut-Lime Cake
Banana Cupcakes
Brown Sugar Cupcakes
Banana Blondie–Bottomed Cheesecake
Adaptable Dump Cake
Caramel Apple Upside Down Cake
Peppermint Pattie Cake
Fruity Pebbles Cake
Icy Lemon Cake
Oatmeal Cream Pie Cookie Cake
{6} Frosting: I’ll take a corner piece, please
Creamy Chocolate Frosting
Candy Frosting
My Favorite Caramel Sauce
Cream Cheese Frosting
Fluffy Meringue Frosting
Cake Batter Frosting
Marshmallow Buttercream
Brownie Batter Frosting
Glaze Icing
Ridiculous Hot Fudge Sauce
Browned Butter Frosting
Marshmallow Fondant
Pretzel Frosting
{7} Pie: Life’s better in a crust
Epic Chocolate Pudding Pie
Over-the-Top Peanut Butter Cup Ice Cream Pie
Payday Pie
Gooey Chocolate Chip Pie
Folded-Crust Apple Streusel Pie
Buttermint Pie
Salty Toffee-Banana Cream Pie
Coconut Cream Pie
Dessert Pizza
{8} Party Snacks: It’s not always about the cake. I can’t believe I just said that
Salty Caramel Corn
Browned Butter Soft Pretzel Nuggets
Birthday Cake Trifle
Monster Cookie Snack Mix
Marble Sheet Cake
Buffalo Ranch Slow-Cooker Snack Mix
Texas Sheet Cake in a Jar
Snacking Granola
Part Two: Did You Save Room for Dinner?
{9} Pizza and Pasta: Let’s carb up!
Pizza Dough
Skillet Pizza
Jalapeño Popper Pizza
Monte Cristo Pizza
Perfect Stovetop Mac and Cheese
Spicy Thai Noodles
King Ranch Mac and Cheese
Fresh Tomato Pasta
Taco Pasta
Taco Seasoning
Sunday Sauce and Spicy Cheesy Meatballs
Garlic Bread Pasta
Bacon and Pea Pasta
{10} Salads and Sammies: Lighter food that will put some meat on your bones
French Onion Soup Grilled Cheese
Asian Lettuce Wrap Chicken Chopped Salad
BLT Panzanella Salad
Frito Pie Sloppy Joes
Grill Seasoning
Chipotle-Lime Chicken Chopped Salad with Creamy Avocado Dressing
Thai Turkey Burgers with Spicy Asian Slaw
{11} Family Favorites: Meals my whole family agrees on. In other words, Miracle Food
Philly Cheesesteak–Stuffed Baked Potatoes
Nacho Soup
Chicken-Fried Steak Meatballs and Gravy
Grilled Pesto Shrimp
Cheeseburger and Fry Casserole
Chicken and Waffle Tenders
Homemade Takeout: Cashew Chicken
Margarita-Marinated Skirt Steak with Pineapple-Avocado Salsa
Acknowledgments
About Shelly Jaronsky
Index
INTRODUCTION
I’m gonna talk a little about me right now.
Hi. Hello. Oh hey.
So here we are. You’re reading, I’m writing. A book. OMG a book.
Hi. How should we start?
I’m Shelly. Let’s be food friends. No, that’s weird.
Okay, let’s just chat. First off, thanks for reading this part. I am the worst about glancing over all the WORDS in cookbooks and skipping to the pictures. I am guessing I am not the only one. I certainly expect my family and loved ones to read this (Hi, Dad!), but if you are not related to me and are still with me here, I love you forever!
Again.
Hi.
So I wrote a book. A cookbook. With food I want you to make and love and share.
Let’s Begin at the End . . .
In the kitchen I live by few rules. I get asked ALL THE TIME, What do you do with all those desserts?
Well, I try them. ALL. Some I eat entirely too much of, but most of the time I practice a moderate amount of self-control and give the food away. A brownie isn’t going to hurt me. A whole tray of brownies might.
But really, dessert has always come first for me. It’s my favorite meal. I choose restaurants based on the dessert menus alone. It’s the truth. Now I can claim it’s all in the name of research, but let’s be honest, dessert is fun. Dessert is a treat. Dessert is special.
And why not eat dessert first? Whoever made up the rule that desserts are a leftover thought if you have room
is my mortal enemy. Nobody puts Baby in the corner.
So my book, like my life and my website, is a little backwards.
A normal cookbook has all your foods: appetizers, soups, entrees . . . with one tiny little chapter, barely a footnote, if you will, reserved for desserts.
I CRY INJUSTICE!
In my world desserts are the headline act. I mean, why not?
So yep, that’s what’s happening here. Desserts run the show. I’ve got tons of amazing, brand-new sweet recipes for you, along with a few of your favorites from my website. PLUS a whole section at the end of the book set aside for some epic mealtime savories.
I hope you can trust my crazy for a bit and sit back and enjoy. I want you to dog-ear the crap out of this book. I want it to be the stained, sticky-paged, marked-up book that you come back to time and time again.
I want to be in your kitchen with you, and this is my shot.
Okay, Now the Beginning . . .
My love for baking (and cooking) began when I was a small girl in my grandma’s kitchen. I used to spend entire summers with my grandparents. My parents would just ship me off after the school year was over and pick me up at the airport a week before summer break ended.
You think I’m exaggerating? I’m totally not.
But that was just fine by me. I loved it at my grandparents’ house. LOVED.
We shopped, we played golf, we swam, we baked, and all the focus was on me. Yes, I am a huge brat with possible narcissistic tendencies because of this, but that’s neither here nor there.
My grandparents’ house was the best. The pantry was always stocked with Kraft Macaroni & Cheese and Pop-Tarts, my favorite foods then, now, and forevermore. My grandma and I would craft together, host dinner parties together, and paint our nails together, and my grandpa used to make those amazing frosting-filled graham cracker sandwiches (which are still one of my favorite food groups), eat saltines slathered with butter, and head to McDonald’s every morning at ten for a biscuit and coffee. He even kept a little tin under his chair at night specifically for his Hershey’s Kisses wrappers. A favorite food memory of my grandpa is back in the late ’80s when SlimFast first came out. Everyone was doing it. So one summer my grandparents went on that liquid meal plan, only my grandpa would mix his SlimFast with ice cream. Not nonfat milk . . . or water . . . or whatever the blend was supposed to be. ICE CREAM. Seriously. I’m not sure how much weight he actually lost, but I am sure it made the diet way more delicious. My point is, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how I ended up with a blog made up of 80 percent sweets.
It’s not my fault, folks. I blame SlimFast.
P.S. My grandpa is still alive and kickin’ at ninety-three years.
Anyhow, beyond the SlimFast, my first memory of creating a recipe was with my grandma in her kitchen making monkey bread. We would make it at least once a week, changing it up a bit each time and taking it over to a neighbor’s house for coffee hour.
Now, as a kid I hated coffee hour. All the adults sitting around talking was so boring. BUT the creating of the monkey bread made all the boring adult conversations totally worth it.
During the not-summer months I lived out most of my childhood in Houston, Texas. (I truly believe all people should be lucky enough to live in Texas at one point in their lives.) Then after college I moved to New Jersey. Yes, on purpose.
You see, my one true love called the Garden State home, which meant that Texas had to be left behind. The move was a tough choice, but love won out. I still live in New Jersey and I’m married to the same dude.
We now have a family with four boys and two ridiculous dogs named Polly and Chewie. Happily ever after.
But Wait, There’s More . . .
So how did I go from being a displaced Texan to sitting here writing a cookbook? Well, thanks for asking! Before I had kids I had a few jobs that were totally not for me and totally not worth talking about really . . . but then after my last little nugget was born I decided I needed something to do. A J.O.B.
I loved cooking every night for my family, but what I loved most was making desserts. Unfortunately I’ve heard you, like, shouldn’t eat desserts all the time.
Stupid, I know.
So one day in 2008, I was online poking around for a recipe and I came across a food blog. I really had no idea what a food blog was, but it seemed like something I would like to try! It gave me a justification for excessive dessert making. I mean, any job that makes baking a giant chocolate cake on a Tuesday morning acceptable . . . well, I want in.
And just like that, I started my website. Let me share a moment of truth with you on the title of my website: It took me about 2.67 seconds to settle on a name. Branding be DAMNED! The only thought involved was that I knew I loved cookies, duh. And I also loved peanut butter cups and cupcakes and I used measuring cups and, well . . .
So, yep. Cookiesandcups.com. It’s certainly not a genius title . . . sometimes people are like, Cups? Like mugs?
Ugh. No. Anyway, I chose it and I am not a quitter. So six years later here I am, still running a website with a confusing name.
Originally I started my site just sharing pictures of the desserts I was making in hopes that someone out there would see them and want me to bake for them too. Being a cookie decorator seemed like a dream job for me at that time, so I just started taking really horribly lit pictures of cute cookies and cupcakes I baked and posted them on my site along with a few incomplete sentences, hoping the phone would start ringing.
It didn’t. Shocking, I know.
Luckily I have some great friends, and with a little word of mouth I was baking regularly for customers. At first it was fun. I really put my heart into it that first year or so. The thing is, occasionally on my website I would share a recipe for something I had made instead of just the picture, and that’s when I started getting the real feedback. People were actually baking the recipes I posted! I found tremendous joy in this. More joy, I’d say, than decorating cookies shaped like frogs and shipping them off to Michigan, only to find out that four out of the twelve cookies broke somewhere over Pennsylvania.
So gradually my website started to shift from a showcase of sorts, to a recipe source. And I was loving it. Creating my own recipes was where I found my groove. After one massive Yankee Stadium Cake FAIL I decided to throw in the towel at cake/cookie decorating. Making a cake that looked like a building was decidedly NOT the direction I wanted to continue going in. Playing around with flavors and ingredients was the part that I liked the best. Just like back in my grandma’s kitchen making monkey bread, trying a little something different each time, I’d finally found my niche.
The more I posted recipes, the more people were reading and, more important, commenting! Building a relationship over the past eight years with the people who read my site has been such a privilege. My website has allowed me to not only bake and create thousands of recipes but it has also introduced me to people around the world whom I would never have otherwise gotten the chance to know. It’s also given me the opportunity to work with some amazing people, to visit places I never would have thought I would get to see, and to use the word work
in a way that makes my heart go pitter-patter. It’s been a blessing times a trillion.
And now, here I am, being given the chance to write a cookbook. It’s an opportunity to share some tried-and-true recipes that are personal and reader favorites, as well as share a whole load of new recipes for you to add to your arsenal!
So read on, friends. Get your measuring cups ready and make sure your sugar bowl is full. We have work to do.
MY RULES (OR LACK THEREOF) IN THE KITCHEN
Let’s talk about my rules for being rule-less.
Since I am a home cook, taught by home cooks, I have an easy approach to most things kitchen related. But let’s talk about where I draw the line. Beginning with butter.
How I Do . . .
BUTTER
Always use butter. Please. There is never an acceptable situation where margarine will do the trick. Trust me on this. I am the girl who grew up with a mother who had the big tub of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! in the fridge at all times. I’m basically an expert on margarine. So you can be confident in knowing it’s never okay.
Also, salted or unsalted? Oh, the question of the ages. I know lots of bakers and professional cooks use unsalted butter, and I certainly see the logic. Start with unsalted butter and you can control the exact amount of salt added to the recipe. Makes sense. However, I always use salted. #Sorrynotsorry. I just like it better, it’s that simple. If you aren’t a salty girl like me, go ahead and use unsalted and add a pinch or two of salt as you need. But please know I am always baking with salted butter, unless otherwise noted (which is pretty much never).
BAKEWARE
I’m a little picky about my baking sheets. The same dough, the same oven temperatures, the same everything . . . it won’t matter. Different baking sheet, different results. It’s a fact.
Think of it like this: The darker the baking sheet, the darker your cookies will get on the bottom. And also, the specific metal or thickness of certain baking sheets can drastically change the outcome of the cookie.
For example I very rarely, if ever, use insulated baking sheets for the reason that they don’t produce browned edges. They might be great for a soft sugar cookie or shortbread that you don’t want any darkness to, but for me that’s about it.
I bake most often on light colored, basic aluminum or stainless steel baking sheets. Honestly my baking sheets are nothing fancy; they’re light in color and weight and large (at least 14 x 17 inches)! I never bother with nonstick baking sheets either because I always, ALWAYS use parchment paper when baking cookies. I have tried the fancy silicone baking mats and nothing (in my opinion) beats classic parchment paper. Parchment makes the cleanup easy, but it also prevents sticking and bakes cookies evenly. Once you start baking with parchment you’ll never go back.
The only time I use my silicone liners (like Silpat) is when I am baking something with an oozy caramel or a hard candy. Silicone is great for situations like those, because nothing will stick!
Can’t Live Without . . .
MIXER
Obviously, I can’t live without my KitchenAid stand mixer. I use it almost every day and it hasn’t let me down yet. If you don’t have a stand mixer, don’t worry, although I would recommend adding it to your Christmas list next year. (What do you mean, kitchen tools aren’t at the top of your holiday gift wish list? What’s wrong with you?)
For the most part, a hand mixer will work