CHOCOLATE BARK COOKIES

Don't waste your money on kitchen tools you'll rarely use. Former Chowhound Senior Food Editor Jill Santopietro shows you how to improvise if you don't own a rolling pin. Armed with this knowledge, see the best pie recipes for Thanksgiving, and how to make your sugar cookies taste better.

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Welcome to Open Kitchen, a series journeying inside the kitchens of renowned chefs and food personalities. In our inaugural episode, we visit legendary cookbook author Dorie Greenspan. Dorie welcomes us into her Connecticut home for a tour of her kitchen. During our visit, she shows us the process through which she creates bestselling cookbooks like "Everyday Dorie" and "Dorie's Cookies." Dorie also walks us through a selection of her favorite kitchen tools, including her adorable silicone spatulas and baking sheets. And after all that, she still has the time to make her delicious French vanilla sablé cookies.

These colorful little sandwich cookies turn us all into kids in a candy store. They’re so perfect that the idea of making them is intimidating — but fear not! To learn how to make them, Guillermo met with master pâtissier Jayce Baudry, the executive pastry chef for Daniel Boulud's Épiceries. The chef taught us tricks and techniques to make the process manageable, even for an amateur baker at home.

At her NYC chocolate shop Stick With Me Sweets, Susanna Yoon (formerly of Per Se) makes edible miniature works of art. These colorful, marbleized, portable chocolate domes are packed with the flavors and textures of some of Susanna’s favorite desserts, which include a kalamansi meringue pie, and the vero, a silver blue bonbon that houses a mix of sea salt caramel and crunchy pecan bits. In the words of the chef, handcrafted chocolate is the sweetest way to tell somebody “stick with me”.

If you want to spend more time caroling, and sipping wine instead of hanging in the kitchen, watch Chef Jansen Chan (International Culinary Center). make colored sugar, the easiest way to make basic sugar cookies shine on your holiday table.