Top 10 Holiday Cookies

By Food & Wine
Updated March 08, 2017
From chocolate-mint cookies to ginger-studded sugar cookies, here are superb holiday cookies.
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Chocolate-Mint Cookies

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These crisp, ultra-chocolaty cookies have a creamy mint filling. They're especially good drizzled with melted dark and/or white chocolate.

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Lebkuchen

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In this version of these traditional German spice cookies, the edges are slightly crisp and the middles, soft and chewy. They're topped with a confectioners' sugar icing that is thicker than the classic see-through glaze. It's important to freeze the soft batter until very firm, so it can be easily scooped onto the baking sheets.

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Ginger-Studded Sugar Cookies

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"My father used a lot of ginger in his baking," says Kevin Sbraga. "It adds that burst of flavor that makes you think, Wow." This sweet, candied-ginger dough can be rolled out and cut into any shape or formed into logs and refrigerated for simple slice-and-bake cookies.

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Chocolate-Gingerbread Cookies

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These marvelous Christmas cookies combine chocolate with spicy gingerbread. "I was tired of basic gingerbread," says Matt Lewis. "And my connection to chocolate is really deep." An added benefit of these cookies: The supple dough is very easy to work with, and the scraps can be rerolled and cut out.

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Pecan Shortbread Cookies

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Karen DeMasco beats the dough for these buttery cookies with an entire vanilla bean, so the oils in the pod add deep vanilla flavor. By rolling the dough in demerara sugar before slicing and baking the cookies, she makes them extra-crispy.

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Chocolate-Chip-Pecan Cookie Bars

Credit: Con Poulos
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Feel free to swap walnuts or almonds for the pecans, or use half nuts and half dried cranberries for tart, chewy bars.

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Coconut Macaroons

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These sweet and chewy two-bite macaroons have only five ingredients (not including the delicious bittersweet-chocolate drizzle). Baker Danny Cohen, a.k.a. Danny Macaroons, doesn’t think all macaroons have to be round. “Make whatever shape you want,” he says. “There are no rules.”

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Jam-Filled Mezzaluna Cookies

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Using a recipe Nancy Silverton taught her for a super-buttery dough, Dahlia Narvaez 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-Espresso Snowballs

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Cocoa, coffee and pecans are rolled together in these semisweet, sugar-dusted cookies.

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Chocolate-Glazed Hazelnut Meringues

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We love these meringues that baker Warren Brown taught pastry chef Gale Gand how to make on her show.

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