The Big (Cookie) Bang
It was the pan-bang heard ‘round the world. In a Minneapolis, Minnesota, kitchen, a frustrated 15-year-old slammed down her baking sheet filled with still-puffy cookie dough balls. The cookies deflated and rippled, forming a frozen shockwave of crispy, caramelized cookie edges around a gooey, barely set middle. They were, in a word, revolutionary.
You probably know the teenage baker better as the adult she grew up to be, Sarah Kieffer, the brilliant mind behind . Sarah has become one of the faces behind an explosive cookie revival, beginning with her pan-banging cookie sensation. Even if you haven’t tried the cookies yourself, you’ve seen their glorious wavy visage by the hundreds on Instagram, with professional and home bakers alike tackling the challenge. Now, with her latest cookbook, (Chronicle, August 2020), Sarah is picking up steam, adding a whole onslaught of pan-banging cookies to her repertoire, from snickerdoodle to rocky road to rum raisin—and that’s just the pan-banging
