Cookies

Children's Literature - Beverly Kobrin

Every step in the making of Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies is detailed in this fascinating view of commercial chocolate chip cookie making, including a look at the die that helps the Ghiradelli Chocolate company turn out 3.5 million chocolate chips and hour-enough for almost 700,000 cookies.

Ilene Cooper

ger for reading aloud. Using a Famous Amos cookie factory in Georgia as a focus, this photo-essay shows readers how cookies come to be. Jaspersohn begins with an introduction to Wally Amos, who turned his aunt's chocolate chip cookie recipe into a successful business. The author then moves the action to the factory, where trucks bring in the fresh ingredients and workers prepare them for the dough. Black-and-white photographs of machines at work are not always the most fascinating of shots, but they do help the text in its orderly description of the process. More interesting are the actual dough mixing, the shaping of the dough into cookies, the cookie inspection and bagging, and the distribution to stores across the U.S. Despite the static quality of some of the photographs (the parking lot at the Ghiradelli Chocolate Company in California, where the chocolate chips come from, is particularly dull), there's enough going on here to attract kids' attention; and, of course, the topic is a tasty one.