I broke down and baked cookies today.  Steve had gotten me a slew of cookbooks for Christmas last year, including Buttercup Bakes at Home (2006), by Jennifer Appel, which has some enticing recipes, so I chose the peanut butter and chocolate chunk cookies.  This is an example of how important photos are in a cookbook.  I made this particular recipe because of how delectable the cookies look on the cover.  In fact, that photo made me ask Steve for this book in the first place.  Pathetic.  The only thing that went wrong was that the chocolate I had ready for piping seized up a bit while I tended to some drama involving Berry and the mail carrier, so rather than nuke really good chocolate twice, I just piped it on as it was, which resulted in big globs instead of attractive stripes.  The cookies tasted great and had the perfect texture – not too soft, not too hard and a bit chewy.  I like to put cookies in the fridge, and these worked very well toward that end, coming out kind of blondie-like.  Buttercup is a popular Manhattan bakery, and they seem to have made their recipes approachable.