If you have any interest in baking, you know Rose Levy Beranbaum, acclaimed for her must-have tome The Cake Bible. She offers both creative excellence and technical mastery. Her advice is compelling and masterful, and she provides a treasury of technical information as well as peerless judgment. This work is every bit as valuable as The Cake Bible and every bit as wide-ranging geographically. Have you ever made kourambiethes? Chocolate puff pastry? Pepparkakors – a stunning recipe with lots of black pepper from Norway?

If you have children, start with her recipe for Lion’s Paws, adorable-looking cookies complete with claws. This is one she invented as part of a magazine article. Look for the hidden chocolate chips. Brilliant!

Altogether, this is a master’s program in cookie making. You will find both techniques to improve your cooking and many wildly delicious recipes. Here is one:

Rose’s Crescents

Ingredients:

• 113 grams of unsalted butter
• 33 grams of sugar (ideally superfine)
• 28 grams of blanched, sliced almonds
• 118 grams of bleached, all-purpose flour
• A pinch of sea salt

An hour before you begin, cut the butter into tablespoon-sized pieces and set them aside to soften.

Process the almonds with the sugar until the nuts are finely ground. Add the butter one piece at a time, and scrape down the sides of the bowl. Add the flour and the salt and pulse until they are incorporated. Scrape the sticky dough onto a sheet of plastic wrap. Press into a thick disc. Wrap and refrigerate for 1 to 2 hours, until the dough is firm.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees for 20 minutes at least, with a rack in the middle of the oven.

Topping

Make a topping with 50 grams of superfine sugar and a quarter teaspoon of cinnamon.

Shaping the Dough

Divide the dough into four equal pieces. Refrigerate three and allow the fourth piece to sit for 10 minutes, then knead it until it is malleable. Pinch off half-tablespoons of dough, roll into cylinders, bend them into crescent shapes, and place them an inch apart on a cookie sheet. Cover with plastic wrap and continue until the sheet is full.

Bake for eight minutes, rotate the sheet, and bake for six to eight minutes more (don’t let the cookies brown). Use a skinny offset metal spatula to put each cookie into a bowl with the topping. Store them at room temperature in an airtight container.