Personality: The Artist
Your paintbrush is a piping bag, and your canvas an undecorated cookie. You have an entire pantry space dedicated to sprinkles and decorative candies, and your Instagram feed overflows with decorating tricks to try. We hope these clever almond and cocoa-mascarpone Santas get your creative juices flowing. Though you likely have every cookie cutter shape and size under the sun, these jolly Santas are crafted from basic cookie cutter shapes most everyone has on hand. You can still make gorgeous cookies without use of your treasured piping bag and frosting. Our multi-cutout tree cookies use the dough for decoration. Divide your dough and tint the portions with food coloring, then do a little more cookie cutter work to get this patchwork look.
Personality: The Shape Shifter
For you, an everyday scooped cookie doesn’t cut it at the holidays. You’re all about changing the shape of things. Chances are you already have a cookie press in your cupboard and the beloved German spritz cookie on your to-do list. Choose your shape, then give our updated coffee version of the spritz a spin. Espresso flavors the dough, and milk is in the icing. It’s a latte you can nibble. Buy It: OXO 13-Piece Cookie Press Set ($32, Bed Bath & Beyond) For a more traditional Christmas flavor pairing, create these fruitcake bars and a tea-infused version of hot buttered rum. The butter you add to the drink has pumpkin pie spice mixed in for even more seasonal flavors.
Personality: The Curious Baker
You’re the cook who buys an unfamiliar ingredient just to see what you can create with it. Let us introduce you to the magic of freeze-dried raspberries. They’re the secret to both coloring and flavoring the pink dough in these marbled shortbread cookies.
Personality: The Reverse Engineer
You’ve never met a restaurant dessert, Girl Scout cookie, or grocery store treat you didn’t want to try to re-create at home. (Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, after all.) Here’s one less recipe to decipher: our homage to the much-loved Milano cookie. Our version has orange zest folded into the cookie and a tender, rather than crisp, texture. (Think madeleine meets soft sugar cookie.)
Personality: The Mash-Up Baker
You’re smitten with the cronut, think ice cream tacos are genius, and always answer “Both!” when asked to choose between desserts. These two-in-one fusion bars (the name is a mash-up of brownie and cookie) are for you. Mounds of peppermint sugar cookie dough bake into a rich brownie batter.
Personality: The Traditionalist
For you, it’s not the holidays if you don’t bake a few batches of your tried-and-true recipes. We developed an old-fashioned ginger crinkle cookie with the slightest of twists for more of the flavor you love without breaking tradition. We love baking up batches of classic snickerdoodle recipes for the holidays, too. But if you’ve got a gluten intolerance (or are baking for someone who does), we have a gluten-free snickerdoodle cookie recipe that fits your eating plan. And for a twist on the classic, give our cocoa-and-spice-infused snickerdoodle a try.
Personality: The Shortcut Baker
Your time is stretched thin—powdered sugar icing thin—but there’s no chance you’ll miss out on cookie baking at holiday time. With an assist from purchased doughs, no-bake cookie recipes, purchased cookies that you can dress up, and other clever cookie shortcuts, you still churn out festive cookies, just with less time in the kitchen.
