Cookie Master
Deceptive simplicity, while high praise in the fashion pages, is dirty pool in the kitchen. Anyone who has gnashed his teeth over a pie crust or baked a doorstop of a poundcake has crossed that fine line between the simple and the impossible. Even butter, sugar, flour and eggs, the most wholesome of ingredients, can behave deviously. Apply heat to sugar, and it melts. Keep going, and it gilds. Butter can be a cold, pure white paste or a liquid gold redolent of hazelnuts. No wonder that shortbread, with its four ingredients, can be more taxing than a tagine, which can have as many as 30. Dorie Greenspan, 57, a baker who has written recipes for and with the most eminent pastry chefs in the world, including Pierre Hermé, Nancy Silverton and Julia Child, says that she's learned the most by watching these masters work with fundamental ingredients. ''You and I will never need to make candied violets,'' she said, rooting around in the refrigerator in her New York apartment. ''But we can learn how to cream butter properly, and it makes a huge difference.'' She emerged with rolls of refrigerated cookie dough, each protected in its own cardboard paper-towel tube.