The ultimate cookie basics for holiday baking

Do-anything-with-them vanilla and chocolate cookie dough recipes to play around with, and share

Bonjour! Hello!

Since you might be opening this while I’m flying across the Atlantic from Paris to New York, I couldn’t decide on the best greeting and so I covered the bases — take your pick. Having just written that, I realize that this month’s Bake and Tell/do-what-you-want-with-it recipe might just as well be called Take-Your-Pick.

For December, as we gear up for the month with so many holidays — most of them sweet — I’m sending you two recipes, each a basic and each exceedingly play-aroundable. Take your pick!

One recipe is for a vanilla cookie dough and the other is for a chocolate dough. Both recipes come from one of my favorite books (there, I’ve said it!), DORIE’S COOKIES. In the book, the recipes are called

• Do-Almost-Anything Vanilla Cookie Dough (click here for printable recipe)

and

• Do-Almost-Anything Chocolate Cookie Dough (click here for printable recipe)

Both recipes make a lot of dough, so I like to divide each batch into four and make a different cookie from each quarter. And…