HOLIDAY COOKIES Author offers recipe for baking success

We all have our preferences for the seasonal sweets.
NEWSDAY
Most seasoned bakers have their own treasured recipes for Christmas cookies. But every now and then, some new favorites make their way onto the list.
One place to look for such finds this year is a fat volume called "The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion: The Essential Cookie Cookbook" ($29.95), by a group of authors at King Arthur, the company that sells flour and other baking supplies.
Outstanding in it are kourabiedes, the Greek favorite, and amaretti cookies. Picks from other books include vanilla-cornmeal shortbread, dark chocolate cookies made with a touch of fancy salt and chocolate-dipped ginger shortbread.
These cookies are all shaped by hand or molded, so busy cooks don't have to worry about rolling and cutting out. The cornmeal shortbread can be cut out if you have the time, but it is just as tasty when made in a circle, traditional shortbread style, and cut into wedges.
Key to success
Tracy Sutton, whose cookies and other confections sell under the name Cookies & amp; Quilts, provided these tips for home bakers:
Be organized. Get out all the cookie recipes you intend to use ahead of time and make sure you have all the ingredients in the house, or put everything you need on a shopping list. "Every time you run out for some small thing, you lose half an hour," Sutton said.
Make anything that needs to be chilled early in the day, then work on other cookies. The chilled dough can be made any time, even a week later, "and that takes the pressure off," Sutton said.
Don't overwhelm yourself with 10 different kinds of cookies in one day. Do two or three or four kinds in a day. Otherwise, Sutton said, "You get tired and they won't come out as nice as you'd like them to."
Keep the kitchen well-ordered. When you finish with one kind of cookie, do a quick cleanup and start again "so that you are not working on top of sprinkles or on top of a different kind of cookies."
Turn up the heat
Try to keep all the cookies that bake at the same temperature going at one time. To get the heat up to a new temperature, give the oven a good five minutes or so. To bring the temperature down, open up the oven for 30 to 40 seconds to let some of the heat out, and preheat to the lowered temperature.
If you are tempering chocolate for dipping cookies, it is easier to work with a larger amount of chocolate, so try to do several dipped cookies at one time.
And of course, all these cookies store well, hoarded in the tins of Christmases past.