Gingerbread cookies are a scrumptious Christmas holiday treat, but with Joanna Farrow's book, Dress Your Gingerbread: Bake Them! Dress Them! Eat Them!, you can enjoy them any time of the year. Farrow begins with a simple recipe that makes four cookies. The instructional chapters include step-by-step instructions with photos to illustrate the techniques. Each different cookie features ingredients, directions, and equipment needed to create it; plus, each has a large full-color photograph you can refer to.

The Bottom Line: Have fun with gingerbread any time of the year by choosing different costumes to dress your cookies in. This book is chock full of ideas for cookies the little ones will love to eat. Choose from insects, animals, fairy tale creatures, and traditional holiday themes (I'm partial to the cute dinosaur myself). Also, the book includes templates and a source list. My only suggestion is that the information on Useful Equipment should have been placed first so that bakers can gather all the necessary tools. Enthusiastically recommended for bakers with moderate to advanced experience because fondant can be tricky.

This review also appears at the Mini Book Bytes Book Review Blog: http://minibookbytes.blogspot.com/ ( )