A Novel Idea

What’s better than curling up on the couch with a good mystery? Curling up on the couch with a good mystery and a good snack, of course! With Joanne Fluke, you get both!

Meet Hannah Swensen, owner of The Cookie Jar bakery in Lake Eden, Minnesota. In this small town, The Cookie Jar is where you go to get your sweet treats and your gossip. Hannah, with her penchant for baking, also seems to have a penchant for finding dead bodies. She inevitably embarks on her own investigation of the crime further complicating her already complicated dating relationship with Mike, the lead detective at the Sheriff’s Department, who tells her to “let the police be the police” but who invariably asks for her help along the way. Sounds like a pretty standard mystery novel plot line, right? Wrong!

The best part about having Hannah, baker extraordinaire, as your main character? Her recipes are in the book!

As Hannah embarks on investigating the murder of flirty fitness instructor Ronni Ward in Cream Puff Murder, I decided to conduct a little investigation of my own. Are The Cookie Jar’s recipes as tasty as the small town folks of Lake Eden say they are or are these recipes just made up to enhance the feel of the books? Let’s find out.

I probably should have baked the title treat of this novel but I opted for Carrot Cake Cookies because they have carrots. And carrots are veggies. And veggies equals “good for me” so it’ll be OK if I eat too many. And then I borrowed a little brilliance from my friend Rebecca (author of I Wanna Be A Domestic Goddess) and I made sandwich cookies with cream cheese frosting/filling and a sprinkling of pecans...

And the result- YUM and FUN! Moist and fluffy, not too sweet, and with a little crunch.

Cream Puff Murder is one of about 16 novels in Fluke’s Hannah Swensen Mystery with Recipes series and I highly recommend them if you need a quick read, a fun mystery, and a few new ideas for tasty treats!