Maida Heatter’s Chocolate Apple-saucers

a chocolate covered, chewy gingerbread-like cookie

I knew nothing much about Maida Heatter, except that she was a prominent baker and famed author of a few baking cookbooks, until sitting down to write up her recipe for these Chocolate Apple-saucer cookies. I bought her Book of Great Cookies on a whim at a used bookstore in Cape Cod this past summer. 

Eight years ago I began reading books aloud to the girls, and Little Women was the first book I chose. I’d always wanted to read it myself, and while I loosely knew the story, reading the book cover to cover would be a new experience for us all. Forgive me if I’ve mentioned this previously, as after 15 years of writing online, my memories get all intertwined. Earlier this year, I’d decided my graduation gift to Isabella would be a vintage copy of Little Women. 

After a few months of searching, I made one last ditch effort while we were on the Cape back in June, and stopped in at Herridge Books in Wellfeet. The copy they had of Little Women wasn’t exactly what I was looking for but the proprietor referred me to Parnassus Books down around mid-cape in Yarmouthport. When I called, the owner said she’d just priced a copy and was about to put it on the shelf for sale. We both got chills at the coincidence of it all. It was fate for Isabella’s copy of Little Women to come from Cape Cod.

I drove to the store, about 40 minutes away from where we were staying, and after securing the copy of Little Women, made my way to the cookbook section. That’s where I came across Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Cookies. A quick scan of the recipes, and I knew they’d been thoughtfully written and researched from her headnotes. I spent a few nights curled up in bed, reading through each recipe and immediately felt like I was reading a cookbook from someone who could be a real-life neighbor or friend. There was nothing overly poetic about her prose, nor was there anything particularly personal. It was just honest, real writing, with the recipes being the center of attention and not the author or my knowledge of their fame, a novelty in this day and age.

Out of curiosity, I did a little internet sleuthing to learn more about Heatter when I sat down to share this recipe, and found out Heatter was a native New Yorker like myself, except she grew up on Park Avenue—in many ways, a world apart from my birthplace in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.

Like myself, Heatter was also a self-taught baker. While culinary degrees are lovely, I would also argue experience and intuition are skills earned through doing repetitively not learned in a six or nine month course. My saying this will no doubt ruffle feathers—go ahead and have at me, if you must. I know many culinary school graduates, some recent and others a decade out of culinary school, who struggle with baking recipes. You have to respect the science of your experiments, since after all baking is a kind of chemistry that yields edible results. School can only teach you basic principles. Time teaches the rest.