The mysterious affair at styles

Cooking With Christie: A Lukewarm Cookbook Review

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Inspiration: Endeavoring to step outside of the usual flavors of my cookies, I started scouring my cookbooks. Happily, I landed on this promising recipe, Toasted Sesame Slice-and-Bake Butter Cookies from Nancy Silverton’s book, The Cookie That Changed My Life and More Than 100 Other Classic Cakes, Cookies, Muffins, and Pies That Will Change Yours. 

Whilst I’m no stranger to slice-and-bake cookies, as I love recipes that require mixing on one day and baking the next, Nancy Silverton and Carolynn Carreno’s recipe threw me for a loop.

Cookbook Review: When I first perused The Cookie That Changed My Life… in my local indie bookshop, I initially glommed onto the recipe for Iced Animal Crackers. Not only do they require sprinkles, but these cookies also allow me to practice cookie-cutter dough — a style of cookie I’ve struggled to reliably produce without my grandmother’s guidance. (My unsupervised efforts always seem to spread, looking more akin to balloon animals than said four-legged friend I was aiming to create.)

What I didn’t realize, until after I got home and delved deeper into the pages, is that I’ve a preference on cookbook layouts. And, you’ve guessed it, The Cookie That Changed My Life… doesn’t follow it. 

Rather than breaking down the recipes into easily checked-off and manageable steps, which in my experience helps ensure you don’t miss adding or manipulating an ingredient, The Cookie That Changed My Life… does not. The recipes are broken down only by the broadest of strokes, leaving bakers with anywhere from 2 to 5 inches of text to parse for several steps in each recipe. Making the somewhat complicated recipes even more challenging/intimidating to reproduce. 

Unless you’re a baker who’s apparently willing to sit down, break down, and rewrite every single recipe before stepping into the kitchen.

What I do appreciate about the book is the clear ingredient list, which gives the weight of most ingredients. (A feature which should not be underestimated.)

If you enjoy pretty cookbooks then, The Cookie That Changed My Life… is for you. The layout and its uniformity, plus the intermittent pictures, create an attractive book. And if you enjoy reading cookbooks like they were works of fiction, then The Cookie That Changed My Life… is one for you. If you don’t tend to lose your place in large blocks of text in the midst of measuring, mixing, and manipulating ingredients, again I would recommend this book. 

However, if you value a practical approach to recipe writing, this book will drive you nuts. As either the editors, writers, or publisher valued style over accessibility.

That being said, the unique flavors, interesting techniques, and variety of recipes do partially make up for this (in my estimation) aforementioned flaw, and I would recommend The Cookie That Changed My Life…

With reservations.

P.S.: This cookbook is not for someone who’s new to baking as some of the processes required to successfully produce the bakes are highly technical and/or unusual.

The Bake: Familiar with the taste buds of my audience, i.e., my husband’s coworkers, I must admit to altering the Toasted Sesame Slice-and-Bake Butter Cookies slightly by adding the zest of one orange and one teaspoon of ground ginger to complement the warm nutty flavor of the toasted sesame. (It also kept the cookie from becoming one note.)

And they went down a treat!

Agatha Christie’s Canon of Characters: This is one of the few bakes I’ve produced that (I think) Hercule Poirot would enjoy. The flavor is subtle, warm, and elegant without being overly sweet. Moreover, the sesame flavor generally pairs well with espresso. Providing Poirot with something to nibble on whilst sipping a bean-based beverage and using his little grey cells.

My 52 Weeks With Christie: A.Miner©2025

Cooking With Christie: Everyday Sourdough

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Inspiration: Over the past few years, I’ve struggled to make and maintain sourdough starters. Much like my fermentation experiments, my forays into these fermented starters always seem to crash and burn before I ever get to the good part — baking! Irritated at the latest failure, I sat down with a stack of cookbooks devoted to sourdough and started studying. Whereupon I found two simple tips/tricks that kept my starter alive long enough to bake with. 

First and easiest fix: wrapping the jar of starter in a kitchen towel. Apparently, my kitchen is a tad too cool for a starter to thrive and it needed a blanket. 

The second solution required a trip to our local farmers’ market, more specifically to the stall selling organic heirloom varieties of flour. According to several books, these small-batch flours contain a variety of micronutrients that help starters flourish, whereas plain old white flour from the grocery store strips away these nutrients.

And it worked!

Happy to have finally made a sourdough starter that lived longer than a couple of days, I started scouring these same tomes for a recipe and found a simple one in King Arthur Baking Company’s Baking School — a straightforward Sourdough Sandwich Bread recipe. 

And it turned out magnificently fluffy!

Unsurprisingly, within a week of making this loaf, my starter died — again. But now I’ve hope!

There’s a similar recipe on their website, but it has way more steps and ingredients. I would highly recommend purchasing the book instead. Over the years, Baking School‘s become the baking book I keep turning to when I need a recipe that turns out beautifully the first and one hundredth time. (BTW: I’m not paid for this review or for making the recipe; I just really like their stuff.)

Christie’s Canon of Characters: Though Agatha Christie’s sleuths often struggle to find and nail down that book’s ne’er-do-well, I don’t know if they’d apply the same deductive reasoning to their failed bakes. Poirot probably would, though I can’t imagine him flubbing up repeatedly on something as supposedly simple as a starter. 

Miss Marple probably mastered this technique early on and teaches it to the long string of maids she hires to help her out around the house. Perhaps Tuppence would struggle? Only because she’s pulled hither, thither, and yon by her three kids, husband, and murder cases. Colonel Race globe-hops entirely too much to even contemplate something as needy as a starter. 

Superintendent Battle, yes, he’s the one who would both want to try making bread and figure out why it failed. He strikes me as a man who would enjoy puttering around the kitchen with his wife and daughters during his off hours. Perhaps not failing on purpose, but still enjoying the exasperation of one of his female family members showing him “the right way” to ensure the bread turned out every time!

P.S.: Here’s a picture of the modest Dagwood Sandwich I made that night for dinner using the sourdough bread!

My 52 Weeks With Christie: A.Miner©2025

Cooking With Christie: Variants

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Inspiration: Recently, whilst my husband was working from home, I asked what cookie his coworkers were hankering after. Instead, they responded with a list of ingredients: oatmeal, cranberry, white chocolate, and bacon bits. Happily, I managed to make the majority of their vision come true in one cookie!

Except for the bacon bits, I’m still working on a recipe for that singularly unique ingredient.

That being said, I was a tad trepidatious about the bake. Why? Whether I used raisins, currents, cranberries, or lingonberries, whenever I made oatmeal cookies the dried fruit always seemed to catch during baking. As the condensed sugar makes it easier for these nuggets of antioxidants to scorch during the 9 – 11 minutes they reside in a 350 degree oven (as I understand it). Thus adding a bitter and burnt taste (I’m never looking for) to the final cookie.

Unwilling to back down from a challenge and having Betty Crocker’s otherwise tried & true recipe in my hip pocket — I decided to give berries one more chance. 

I’m glad I did.

The recipe I traditionally use comes from one of Betty Crocker’s many cookbooks. This recipe here is the one I found online that’s closest to mine.

According to my book, after combining the recipe’s first eleven ingredients in the bowl all at once, the baker is then instructed to mix the oats, flour, and raisins together — in that order. 

Unsurprisingly, I’ve strayed from this original order of operations over the years. Mixing the wet ingredients first. (The baker’s sugar and brown sugar are combined with the butter and butter-flavored Crisco, then the eggs are cracked in one at a time, and the vanilla is added last.) 

Whilst my mixer is churning and whirring the wet ingredients, I whisk the dry together in a separate bowl. (Flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon.) Then, I added the oats, pumpkin seeds, and raisins (when I used them).

Turns out I should’ve altered the order of operations just a little further. 

Turns out, when I mixed the fruit in first – and – the oats last, the fruit no longer scorched in the oven! Seems the thorough coating of the base batter the berries receive solved my scorching problem and, happily, didn’t create a new one! I’ve made a half-dozen batches since without issue, and for someone who’s constantly looking for a better breakfasts cookie, I’m over the moon!

I never thought such a simple trick would make such a huge difference. All thanks to my husband’s coworkers laying down a challenge (even if they weren’t aware of it).

Another Helpful Tip from Me to You: I did need to quarter the dried cranberries before mixing them into the batter; otherwise, they probably still would’ve still scorched due to their size. And according to the group of tasters, this flavor combo turned out really well.

Variant: Recently, I’ve substituted dried blueberries for raisins. A swap my tastebuds likes much better! They also stand up well to the increased amount of cinnamon I’ve started incorporating into the cookies. I also discovered powdered vanilla mixes more uniformly (with the dry ingredients) into my batter and is slightly stronger in flavor than its liquid counterpart.

Christie’s Canon of Characters: Predictably, the sleuths I can most see tinkering with recipes are Miss Marple and Tuppence for similar reasons. Fiddling with a recipe allows one to land unexpectedly on someone’s doorstep and ask their opinion of your new adjacent creation. This conversational gambit creates an opening that allows one to naturally segue onto more pertinent topics, like alibis, unofficial witness statements, and their opinions of the victim. 

(Joanna Fluke’s Hannah Swenson mysteries are predicated on this idea.)

My 52 Weeks With Christie: A.Miner©2025

Cooking With Christie: Mustard

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Inspiration: Whilst shopping in my favorite spice shop, I spotted several bottles of mustard seeds and vaguely recalled a homemade mustard recipe I’d glanced at in one of my cookbooks. So I grabbed bottles of yellow, brown, and black seeds.

After taking a closer look at the Spicy Brown Mustard Recipe Master Recipe in Joseph Shuldiner’s The New Homemade Kitchen, I discovered mustard is dead easy to make.

Seriously. 

Seeds, salt, spices, vinegar, and time. That’s it. And let me tell you, it smells and tastes great! I highly recommend giving this condiment a whirl, as watching the seeds slowly absorb the vinegar is wild!

Helpful Hint from Me to You: Though the recipe says you can blend the seeds in a blender to create the finished product. Unless you own one of those fancy high-speed ones (and even then, I’m not sure as I don’t own one myself), this is the wrong tool for the job. 

Choose the food processor option! 

Otherwise, you could end up like me with a kitchen inexplicably covered in clumped-up seeds, despite the care taken when transferring the concoction from vessel to vessel!

Next: Halve the recipe. 

Until you get the flavor combo to your liking, at least, as it turns out that this particular recipe makes about two and a half cups of the finished product. 

Now, if you go through this whole-grain mustard like water, then the sheer volume this recipe produces isn’t a problem. However, if you don’t, it makes noodling with the recipe challenging.

One Last Thing: In future batches, on top of the aforementioned halving, I’m going to double the amount of Madras Curry Powder added (the additional flavor I chose for this trial run). Turns out, the spiciness of the brown mustard seeds and the tang of the apple cider vinegar wholly overshadow the curry powder. (i.e., I can’t taste it.)

Agatha Christie: Honestly? I can easily see Miss Marple, Tuppence, and Superintendant Battle making their own mustard…And closely guarding their version’s recipe! 

Can you imagine trying to crowbar the list of secret ingredients from any one of them? And even if they did, finally, relent….Would they actually hand over the complete list or hold one or two back?

My 52 Weeks With Christie: A.Miner©2025

Cooking with Christie: A Cookie I’d Never Heard of Before (But You Probably Have!)

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This Week’s Recipe: Hot Chocolate Cookies

Inspiration: A friend of ours, my husband and I love playing board games with, invited us over to his house to celebrate his birthday. To fuel the mini-celebration, I asked what kind of cookie he’d like me to bake as a treat. After texting several suggestions, all of which would kill me due to the nuts they called for, he landed on Hot Chocolate Cookies.

This request immediately sent me to the internet because none of my many, many cookbooks contained a recipe for such a specimen. …and lo and behold, I found a recipe from a source I am quickly coming to trust — Ree Drummond, aka The Pioneer Woman.

Using a 72% dark chocolate and Swiss Miss cocoa mix and unsalted butter (on accident), I set to work…..and they turned out great! (Despite the fact I got melted chocolate everywhere due to an ill-placed kitchen rug I tripped on at a crucial moment. In any case….)

Even better? The Birthday Boy adored them!

Next time I make these, which I’ve got a feeling will be soon, I will try them with 100% dark chocolate. Whilst the 72% tamped down the sweet factor of the sugar, marshmallows, cocoa, and white chocolate chips — I think these might be even better with an extremely dark chocolate!

Christie: I believe Tuppence would enjoy making these for her kids as they are pretty simple to make but look unusual/exciting with the marshmallow on top!

(I also thought it worked well with The Mysterious Affair at Styles, since Hot Chocolate plays such an important part in the mystery!)

Cooking With Christie: Cookies!

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Cooking With Christie!

This Week’s Recipe: Brown Butter-Chai Spice Snickerdoodles

Every year Bake From Scratch puts out a new holiday cookie magazine and honestly it’s the best one out there.

In fact all my families favorite cookies are created by them.

The Brown butter Snickerdoodles recipe, from this year’s magazine, is an excellent cookie. With the subtle nutty ones from the browned butter pairs so well with the warm sweet/spice of the snickerdoodle…It is an instant fave of the neighborhood!

Here’s the magazine where the recipe is from:

Christie: Honestly Poirot might like them, as they are a posher version of the normal cookie. But I think Hasting would swoon for them!