The Ultimate Minnesota Cookie Book: Review + Recipe
Imagine getting a cookie cookbook full of 100 of the best cookie recipes from a holiday cookie contest held in Minnesota. Sound a bit specific? The Ultimate Minnesota Cookie Book is that cookbook. I had the opportunity to test out several recipes from the book in order to give it a thorough review. So let’s see if it’s worth buying!
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Thank you to University of Minnesota Press for providing products for me to use and review in this post.
The Ultimate Minnesota Cookie Book
During the holiday season, I was contacted by University of Minnesota Press with the opportunity to review The Ultimate Minnesota Cookie Book. I love baking, I love cookbooks, and I love sharing my thoughts on baking topics with other home bakers, so I was ecstatic about this!
While I did receive this cookie book in exchange for my review, my thoughts and opinions on the book are completely my own. In this post, I’ll tell you what I loved and what I did not love about the book.
Criteria
Everyone has their own personal preferences on what they want in a cookbook. However, there are a few qualities or features that most look for, such as value, quality, photos, and overall variety.
Value – The cookie book costs $29.95, which is a fairly moderate price. However, you get a lot of bang for your buck. There are 100 recipes and over 250 pages of content. In my opinion, a great value.
Quality – This book is also high quality. It’s sturdy with a hard cover and thick, glossy pages. I could easily leave the book open to a recipe without it closing in on itself. Watch this reel I made when I first got it to see the quality for yourself.
Photos – Each recipe includes a picture of the finished bake. This is incredibly helpful for home bakers to understand what the cookies should look like, plus it entices you to try some of the more unique cookies that you may not have seen before.
Variety – No one wants to buy a cookbook with 100 variations of the same cookie. The Ultimate Minnesota Cookie Book has seven different categories of cookies with so many unique recipes. In my opinion, there does not seem to be a pattern of repetition in the book.
What I Liked
There were so many features that I loved about this cookie book. The biggest win for me was the vast variety of cookies. Most of the cookie recipes were completely new to me with their own unique flavors, textures, and composition. When I choose to buy a cookbook, I want it to bring something new to the table. This one sure does.
One thing I love about most cookies is how dang simple they are to make. While I do love a challenge, I also love being able to whip up a stress free batch of cookies and stun my friends and family with their deliciousness. If that’s your baking vibe, The Ultimate Minnesota Cookie Book delivers.
What I Didn’t Like
I thoroughly enjoyed testing out this cookie book, but nothing is perfect and I had just a few minor complaints. My biggest issue was that the ingredients were listed by volume and did not include any measurements by weight. I understand that most American home bakers use volume, but I don’t and I don’t think we should. It led to some weird measurements like “2 ¼ cups plus 2 tablespoons flour”.
While I love that each recipe includes a picture, I felt that sometimes the picture did not match the directions. For example, the Clareos are rolled out to ¼” thick. I used my rolling pin with thickness guides to be precise, yet my cookies came out significantly thicker than the photos depict. Despite this, I made the correct number of cookies, without running out of dough too quickly.
The recipes are concise and almost exclusively take up one page, with a second page for the photo. Because of this brevity, I did find some of the recipes to be a hair vague at times. That being said, I used common sense and my experience to make decisions and every batch came out perfect. Ultimately, I don’t think anyone could truly, hopelessly mess up the recipes.
Related Reading: Fudgy Chocolate Cookie Bars
The Recipes
In order to properly review The Ultimate Minnesota Cookie Book, I made three different recipes from three different chapters. Each recipe was simple, but absolutely delicious. I picked out a recipe, my husband and son picked out another, and my social media followers helped pick the third one.
Clareos
Clareos come from the Sandwich Cookies chapter and are described as “better-than-Oreos”. The soft chocolate sugar cookies are filled with a simple coffee buttercream. I love how rich and fudgy the chocolate cookies are without being dense or claggy.
The coffee filling is easy to make and tastes delicious, especially with the rich chocolate cookies. However, the water in the filling did cause my buttercream to split a bit. The texture did not look great when I filled them, but everything tasted great.
Strawberry Margarita Gems
From the Drop Cookies chapter, I tried these Strawberry Margarita Gems. Despite the name, there is no alcohol in the recipe. They are lime thumbprint cookies filled with a homemade strawberry lime jam and topped with flaky sea salt.
Of the three, these were my husband’s favorite! The cookies were soft, sweet, and so yummy. I couldn’t taste much of the lime, though my son insisted he could. Without a doubt, I’d make these again.
Chai Crescents
The Chai Crescents from the Cutout Cookies chapter were picked by one of my Instagram followers. I love chai, so I was intrigued, but ultimately I wasn’t overly enthused by them at first. However, they were incredible!
These “delicate-as-pie-crust” cookies have chopped nuts in the dough, which add flavor and texture, but the chai sugar dusting is the star. I did not have high hopes that the sugar would stick to the cookies very well, but they turned out perfect. The chai sugar brings so much flavor to the simple cookie.
Buy This Now
You heard me. If you are looking for a new baking cookbook, you should buy The Ultimate Minnesota Cookie Book. For just about $30, you’ll get 100 unique, delicious cookie recipes all wrapped up in a sturdy, high quality book.
As an East Coast girlie, I can assure you that you don’t need to be a Minnesotan (is that what y’all are called?) to absolutely love the cookies you’ll make with this cookbook. There are many types of cookies with a variety of flavor profiles, textures, and styles. You will not get bored.
Enjoy!
The publishers of this fun cookie book gave me permission to share one of the recipes with you. After polling my lovely readers on Facebook and Instagram, the clear winner was the Clareos! Try this recipe and enjoy a peek into this cookbook.
And if you know someone who actually is from Minnesota, you should make sure they know about this awesome cookie book. Happy Baking <3
Clareos
Ingredients
For Cookies
- 1 ¼ cups flour, plus extra for rolling dough 5.75 oz
- 2 teaspoons instant espresso powder
- ¼ teaspoon salt
- ¾ cup unsalted butter, at room temperature 6 oz
- ¾ cup granulated sugar 5.5 oz
- 1 egg
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- ¾ cup unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa powder 2.5 oz
For Filling
- 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
- 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons powdered sugar 4 oz
- 1 tablespoon strongly brewed coffee, plus extra if filling is too thick
Instructions
To Prepare Cookies
- In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, espresso powder, and salt, and reserve. In the bowl of an electric mixer on medium-high speed, beat the butter until creamy, about 1 minute. Gradually add the granulated sugar and beat until light and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Add the egg and beat until thoroughly combined. Add the vanilla extract and beat until thoroughly combined. Reduce the speed to low and gradually add the cocoa powder, mixing until just combined. Add the flour mixture in three additions, mixing until just combined. Divide the dough into two equal pieces. Form the dough into disks, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 2 hours or overnight.
- When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 325℉ and line the baking sheets with parchment paper.
- On a lightly floured surface using a lightly floured rolling pin, roll the dough to ¼-inch thickness. Using a 2-inch round or scalloped cookie cutter, cut as many circles as possible and place 1 inch apart on the prepared baking sheets. Repeat with the remaining dough, gathering up the scraps, re-rolling, and cutting until all the dough is used.
- Bake the cookies until they no longer look wet and are soft to the touch, 7 to 9 minutes. Remove the cookies from the oven and cool for 2 minutes before transferring them to a wire rack to cool completely.
To Prepare Filling
- In the bowl of an electric mixer on medium- high speed, beat the butter until creamy, about 1 minute. Reduce the speed to low and gradually add the powdered sugar. Add the coffee and mix until thoroughly combined (adding more, 1 teaspoon at a time, if necessary to reach the desired consistency). Increase the speed to high and beat until the filling is creamy, about 2 minutes.
To Assemble Cookies
- Spoon 1 teaspoon of the filling on the flat side of one cookie. Place the flat side of a second cookie against the filling, as if making a sandwich. Press gently, just until the filling is at the edge of the cookies. Repeat with the remaining cookies.
Notes
- This dough must be prepared in advance.
- I've included weight measurements, but those are not in the book.
- Reprinted with permission from The Ultimate Minnesota Cookie Book: 100 Best Recipes from the Star Tribune's Holiday Cookie Contest by Lee Svitak Dean and Rick Nelson, photography by Tom Wallace. Published by University of Minnesota Press, November 2024.Copyright 2024 by Lee Svitak Dean and Rick Nelson. Photographs copyright 2024 by Tom Wallace.
Colleen
Hi there! I’m Colleen, a novice baker with a passion for learning and improving my bakes… and blunders. On Bakes and Blunders, you can find all sorts of tasty recipes that range in difficulty, but most importantly, I’ll try to explain the reason behind important steps. If you know why a recipe works, you can tweak and adapt it to suit your unique tastes, and you’ll be able to reliably produce some very delicious treats. If you love baking and want to expand and grow your skills, or if you are a casual baker and just need some pointers, my blog is right up your alley! Join me on my baking journey and we’ll learn how to make more impressive recipes together.
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