Cookies

By Food & Wine
Updated May 15, 2019
Here, a collection of Food & Wine's best cookie recipes for any occasion, from fast and easy no-bake chocolate peanut butter cookies to soft and moist matcha tea cake cookies.
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Matcha Tea Cake Cookies

Credit: © CON POULOS
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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.

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Bacon-Chocolate-Chip-Oatmeal Cookies

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

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Nutty Chocolate Chip Cookies

Credit: PHOTO © FREDRIKA STJÃRNE
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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.

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Crunchy Peanut Butter Cookies

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

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Fudgy Chocolate-Walnut Cookies

Credit: PHOTO © QUENTIN BACON
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New York pastry chef François Payard's divinely gooey chocolate cookies are flourless, which makes them ideal for Passover baking.

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Double-Ginger Sugar Cookies

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

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Spotted Porcupine Cookies

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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."

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Butter Cookies with Clove Sugar

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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.

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Yockelson's Large and Luscious Two-Chip Oatmeal Cookies

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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.

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No-Bake Chocolate-Peanut Butter Cookies

Credit: Fredrika Stjärne
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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.

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Sugar-Crusted Chocolate Cookies

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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.

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Spiced Gingerbread Cookies

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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.

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Pecan Sandies

Credit: PHOTO © ROBERT RAUSCH
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These cookies are unbelievably light, delicate and crisp. The secret is to let the cookie dough chill overnight before slicing and baking.

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Cherry-Nut Mudslides

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

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Linzer Cookies with Spiced Jam

Credit: PHOTO © JOHN KERNICK
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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).

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Green-Tea Fortune Cookies

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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.

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Vanilla Crescents

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

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Granola Cookies with Chocolate Chips

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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.

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Candy Cookies

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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.

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Jam-Filled Mezzaluna Cookies

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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.

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Chocolate-Mint Thumbprints

Credit: © QUENTIN BACON
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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.

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Chocolate Chip Granola Cookies

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

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Lemon-Curd Sandwich Cookies

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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.

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Chocolate-and-Pistachio Biscotti

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

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Cocoa Nib-Chocolate Chip Cookies

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

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Coconut-Raspberry Thumbprints

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

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Butterscotch Chocolate Sandwich Cookies

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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.

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Almond Cookies with Caramel Dipping Sauce

Credit: © John Kernick
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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.

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Chocolate Macarons

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

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Baby Buttons

Credit: PHOTO © QUENTIN BACON
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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."

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Iced Brown Sugar Cookies

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"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.

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Slightly Chewy Ginger Cookies

Credit: © John Kernick
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Unlike most shortbread cookies, these are made with whole wheat, which gives them a nice, toasty flavor.

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Einkorn Shortbreads

Credit: John Kernick
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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.”

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Molasses Thumbprints 
with Cajeta