Rose and I made cookies today: the recipe calls them "Maya Pies" and says that they're a version of Devil Dogs, but made without bizarre chemicals: Chocolate sandwich cookies with a sort of vanilla buttecream filling. I think they could also be called moon pies, but anyway, they were yummy. Lots of butter, so rich, but yummy.

Now, the cookbook is the one from Rosie's bakery in Cambridge, Mass: Rosie's ... Baking Book by Judy Rosenberg. I used to make brownies, for example, using her recipe, but I hardly use this book anymore: I've found recipes I like more elsewhere; more on this in a bit. Rosie's book has a different problem: the recipes try to be too precise. The one today asked for 14 tablespoons of all-purpose flour and 6 tablespoons of cake flour. How important can this ratio really be? Why not 13 and 7? Why not 3/4 cup of one and 1/2 cup of the other — does her particular ratio produce cookies that are that much better than ones that require dipping a measuring cup 3 times (1/2 cup + 1/4 cup AP flour, 1/2 cup cake flour) versus ones that require 20 dips (1 tablespoon at a time) if you're not up to doing the math to convert tablespoons to fractions of cups? I find this hard to believe. Since I was making a gluten-free version anyway, I just dumped in 1 1/4 cups of all-purpose gluten-free flour substitute: in this case, the French bread mix (without the yeast) from the Gluten Free Pantry. It worked beautifully. If it works so well using this flour, it probably works fine with all cake flour, or all AP flour, or any combination of the two... So what's the point of this precision?

Lots of the recipes in this book have similar instructions: use 1/2 cup minus one tablespoon of this, or 1 cup plus one tablespoon of that. It's good to be pretty careful when baking, but I think she goes overboard. Compare with any of the dessert books by Maida Heatter. Everything I've ever made from one of her books has been just amazingly good; her Palm Beach Brownies are my favorite serious brownie recipe, and she has some great flourless chocolate torte recipes as well. Her instructions are precise, but they feel more authentically so, and given my success with her desserts, I basically trust what she says. Rosie's book falls more in the category with books like the China Moon Cookbook, which has delicious food but complicated ingredients (first make this flavored oil, then make this homemade spice blend, then make this homemade version of hoisin sauce, and then you can cook the recipe...), and also silly instructions ("store this in an impeccably clean jar" — does this mean that for the other recipes, I can use sort of scuzzy jars and cookwear? It reminds me of the old joke about the two guys who both order martinis and one of them says, "Make sure you put it in a clean glass." A little while later the server returns with the drinks and says, before setting them down, "Now, which one of you wanted the clean glass?")

Look, if you're writing a cookbook (or any other sort of technical writing, I imagine), you should require a reasonable amount of care and precision from your audience, but if you ask for more, you should explain why, not just have random variation with no justification (and with no great penalty if the directions aren't followed — otherwise you're basically encouraging people to ignore your instructions, it seems to me).