Imagine a kitchen warm witih the smells of sweet vanilla, fragrant cinnamon, and fresh butter. On the kitchen counter is a cooling rack piled high with fresh-from-the-oven delights filled with chocolate chips and crunchy pecans. Ah, the age-old comfort of cookies.

Next imagine that each of the yummy treats began with a convenient box of cake mix. That's right, a standard 18.25-ounce box of cake mix is the secret to some of the tastiest, simplest, and most irresistable cookies imaginable. With a few extra ingredients, turns of a spoon, and whirrs of a mixer, cake mix can make anyone a prize cookie baker.

Like Cookie Dough Delights and Brownie Mix Bliss, Cake-Mix Cookies is the first cookbook of its kind. Although several cake-mix cookbooks exist, including the bestselling Cake Mix Doctor books and 101 Things to Do with a Cake Mix, they offer only a small number of cookie and bar recipes and overlap one another.

By contrast, Cake-Mix Cookies is filled with an array of more than 175 drop, shaped, filled, and bar cookie options for every occasion. Numerous all-American favorites are used as starting points: chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, jam thumbprints, and dark chocolate brownies. There are also new takes on classic European cookies; for example, crunchy Italian biscotti, tender French madeleines, and rich Viennese teacakes. Finally, a healthy dose of new cookies has been created for the book: blackberry-lemon buttermilk bars, triple chocolate chess squares, and chocolate blackout.

Cake-Mix Cookies contains the broadest range of new recipes for cookies and bars that is unavailable elsewhere. And while it capitalizes on the popularity of baking with cake mixes, it has its own unique niche on the home cook's shelf.