Our Best Cookie Recipes

These delicate cookies are made with oil, so they’re moist and tender. Matcha gives them a light, toasty flavor and turns them a pretty green.

Bacon really does make everything better. It gives these easy oatmeal cookies a hint of smoky flavor and a little bit of crunch.

Should a chocolate chip cookie be chewy or crispy? This recipe, with its crisp crinkly top and chewy center, is both. We also give guidelines for anyone who demands a perfectly chewy or completely crisp version.

These crowd-pleasing cookies can be on the table in less than 30 minutes.

New York pastry chef François Payard's divinely gooey chocolate cookies are flourless, which makes them ideal for Passover baking.

Grace Parisi opts for baking soda instead of baking powder to create delectable holiday sugar cookies that are especially crispy.

Catherine Ralston, an 11-year-old whose other culinary creations include Leaning Tower of Pizza Burgers and Ohana Pineapple Steak, likes animals, polka dots and cookies. Her porcupine cookies have pretzel-stick "quills," with M&M's doubling as polka dots. She says, "I thought pretzels would be good in cookies because salty can go well with sweet."

Kantin Dükkan chef Semsa Denizsel’s crumbly cookies are lightly flavored with the ground cloves she mixes into the confectioners’ sugar coating. Clarified butter in the cookies makes them extracrisp.

Lisa Yockelson's Chocolate Chocolate is a massive compendium of 200 recipes for almost every chocolate dessert imaginable. There's one recipe that's not in the book, however: her irresistible chocolate-chip oatmeal cookies, filled with shredded coconut to make them extra chewy.

Grace Parisi's crumbly, ultra-peanutty cookies require only four ingredients: puffed-corn cereal, peanut butter cups, peanut butter and chocolate sprinkles. The powdery texture of the ground cereal prevents the cookies from feeling sticky.

This is Jacques Torres's recipe for sables, a classic French butter cookie with a sandy, crumbly texture (sable means "sandy")—though this fabulously dense version is actually more like shortbread.

Julianne Jones’s wonderfully zingy gingerbread cookies have a tender and cakey texture, yet they’re sturdy enough to decorate. As an alternative to the icing here, you can sprinkle the tops of the cookies with demerara sugar (a coarse, raw cane sugar) before baking for a nice crunch.

These cookies are unbelievably light, delicate and crisp. The secret is to let the cookie dough chill overnight before slicing and baking.

Here is the chocolate lovers' cookie: a deeply rich, moist cookie speckled with hazelnuts, pistachios and dried cherries.

Kevin Sbraga credits his father, Harvey Beachem, with creating these linzer torte–inspired cookies at Harvey's Bakery in Willingboro, New Jersey. He takes his father's recipe one step further, adding anise and coriander to the raspberry jam that he spreads between the hazelnut cookies (which are spiced with cinnamon and cloves).

Joanne Chang likes having fun with the fortunes she puts inside these large cookies, like "Give the chef a big kiss." Shaping the tuiles while they're hot can be tricky, so consider using cotton gloves.

Incredibly, these light, crispy and fragrant crescent cookies require only five ingredients to make.

In a cute spin on oatmeal cookies, Melissa Rubel Jacobson adds toasted pecans, dried apricots and semisweet chocolate chips to the dough to make it extra-chunky.

These truffle-like cookies have an unexpected piece of candy in the centers. They're adapted from a traditional holiday cookie that Renato Poliafito discovered during his travels in Germany.

While traveling in Italy with Matt Molina, pastry chef Dahlia Narvaez was inspired by all the different forms of pasta. Using a recipe Nancy Silverton taught her for a super-buttery dough, she made vanilla-scented cookies shaped like mezzaluna ("half moon") pasta and filled them with a mixed-berry jam she found in Panicale.

Thumbprint cookies—made by pressing a small round of dough with the thumb to form an indentation—are great for filling with chocolate or jam. These thumbprints have a creamy, minty white-chocolate filling. Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito often mix chopped Andes mint candies into the batter, but any kind of mint-flavored chocolate works well.

Melissa Rubel Jacobson adds pecans and dried apricots here to riff on the oatmeal chocolate chip cookie.

Sablés (French butter cookies) were Kevin Sbraga's favorites growing up. "I'd sneak them when I wasn't supposed to," he says. His wife, Jesmary, who teaches baking, had the idea to sandwich them with lemon curd.

Kevin Sbraga varies these wonderful nutty biscotti, sometimes dipping them in melted dark chocolate for an extra layer of flavor.

Chocolate with cocoa nibs adds an ingenious twist to the classic chocolate chip cookie.

Use a spoon or your thumb to make a dent for the raspberry-jam filling.

Be the star of a cookie swap with these gorgeous sandwich cookies. If you're feeling lazy, opt for Maury's Cookie Dough, available at supermarkets or by calling 877-328-3687.

More Sandwich Cookies

For Fabio Trabocchi's Spanish-born wife, Maria, it isn't Christmas without polvorones, crumbly Spanish almond cookies traditionally made with pork fat. Trabocchi developed this all-butter version while he and Maria were living in London and unable to find the Spanish original.

These sandwich cookies get plenty of rich chocolate flavor from cocoa powder and an intense ganache filling.

These buttery, almost weightless cookies are a fixture at Big Sugar events. "We love to offer them in small, ribbon-tied gift packages for favors at bridal and baby showers," Lisa Ritter says. And because of their relatively low sugar content, "people who don't normally love sweets are delighted with these."

"I really like the idea of using white frosting on this cookie, which has a little bit of brown sugar in it for great color, because the contrast between the two is so distinct," says Matt Lewis of Brooklyn's Baked bakery.

Unlike most shortbread cookies, these are made with whole wheat, which gives them a nice, toasty flavor.

In her quest to re-create the quinessential flavor of her grandmother’s butter cookies, chef-owner Roxana Jullapat of L.A.’s Friends & Family came up with these unique cookies with toasty, nutty and caramel-like notes. “I have a crush on einkorn,” she admits, “which I blame on my local miller, Nan Kohler, of GRIST & TOLL.”

“The cajeta filling for these cookies was a natural twist at a Mexican restaurant,” says pastry chef Ivan Marquez of L.A.’s Broken Spanish. “I also like the play of the sweet goat-milk caramel against the slightly bitter molasses and sharp candied ginger.”

Using confectioners' sugar in the dough in place of granulated sugar gives these lemony cookies a light deliciously crumb.