A Collection of Christmas Cookies

It’s Cookie Week around here which simply means that we’re spending the whole week talking about cookies and only cookies. If you haven’t checked out Monday’s brand new biscotti recipe, hop on over and give it a read and add them to your cookie baking list too.

Christmas cookies are especially fun to make (and enjoy) because usually, they are little crunchy works of art. Here are a few of my very favorite holiday cookie recipes from the blog.

You can go directly to each of these recipes by clicking on the corresponding photo.

Soft Ginger Cookies

In my mind, gingerbread is the quintessential Christmas cookie. Deeply spiced and filled with molasses, they make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. This is my favorite gingerbread cookie recipe, though a bit different from the traditional. They are heavy on the ginger (like a ginger snap), but soft and fluffy and rolled in crunchy sugar. I’ve also dipped them in cream cheese glaze or drizzled them with icing and they are always perfect. Plus, this blog post contains some tips and tricks from preventing cookie spread-age.

Brown Sugar Cookies with Rosemary Butter Glaze

I don’t love sugar cookies, so these were my solution to a classic sugar cookie cut-out. Thick and chewy, they are filled with brown sugar and then dunked in a simple rosemary glaze. They are simple, but elevated and would make a great holiday party dessert. They are also stamped with adorable little cookie stamps instead of the more traditional cookie cutter method for an added aesthetic.

Chamomile and Apricot Linzer Cookies

A Christmas cookie spread is not a Christmas cookie spread without Linzer cookies. Known by their famous little filled windows, Linzers feature two shortbread cookies sandwiched with jam. In this version, a floral chamomile shortbread cookie is filled with bright apricot jam. They are simple and adorable and you won’t be able to get enough of them.

Butterscotch Oatmeal Cookies with Hazelnuts and Espresso

This is one of my favorite recent blog recipes. A thick, chewy oatmeal cookie absolutely stuffed with butterscotch, toasted hazelnuts, and fragrant espresso. What could be better?

Hawaij Snickerdoodles

Hawaij is one of my very favorite fall/winter spices and I’m always looking for ways to incorporate it during the holiday season. It’s a Yemini spice blend featuring lots of ground ginger and cardamom, plus a few other warming spices. In this recipe, we incorporate it into a classic snickerdoodle to create a cooke reminiscent of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and I’m 100% into it. And an added bonus: any leftover hawaij is really fantastic stirred into your morning coffee.

White Chocolate Cherry Cookies with Rose Butter

This was one of the very first Christmas cookie recipes I developed and I created it for my momma. Floral rose petals are steeped into the butter and then the soft cookies are studded with white chocolate pieces and big dried red cherries.

Chocolate Espresso Crinkle Cookies

Winter snowballs but make them cookies. A fudgy, brownie like interior is packed with dark chocolate and espresso and then each cookie is rolled in powdered sugar for that just-took-a-dip-in-freshly-packed-snow look. A Christmas classic.

Fig Butter and Blue Cheese Rugelach

Ok here me out. Save this recipe for the first week of January when you are in holiday-recovery mode and need to use up all of the leftover scraps in your fridge. Charcuterie board leftovers turned cookies are what we have here. I used fig jam and blue cheese, but you can fill these little rugelach with any combination you can imagine.

And because any cookie can be a Christmas cookie if you just believe, you can browse all of my cookie recipes here.

Biscotti with Dark Chocolate, Hazelnuts, and Clementine

Crunchy, Italian-style biscotti studded with puddles of dark chocolate, toasted hazelnuts, and bright winter clementines. This simple biscotti recipe will make a perfect addition to your holiday cookie baking.

Making friends as an adult is hard. Moving to a new city and then making friends as an adult is even harder. Moving to a new city, running your own business completely from your home and then making friends as an adult is really really hard. So many of our relationships are built on shared experiences—there are friends you went to high school with, those you went to college with, and co-workers turned friends—but how do you find your people in an entirely new place when there aren’t many other people around to connect with?

This past six months in Minneapolis has been so much fun. We’ve gotten to explore a brand new city, eaten at so many new restaurants, enjoyed beautiful summer and fall weather, and so much more. But it’s also been really lonely at times. Since I work entirely from home as a freelancer and run a business that I built by myself, I’ve found it’s been a bit tricky to meet new people. I’ve made a few local internet-turned-real-life friends which has been really neat. In fact, in having coffee with Amanda from HeartBeet Kitchen, I met the very first person to have the same job as me and that was a super fun experience.

I’ve also been very blessed to have a husband with a job that involves people. His co-workers and their families have been so generous in helping us create a little home here in the North. Sometimes, it’s easy for me to give into to feeling sorry for myself. To break down and cry because I miss my people who now live thousands of miles away and because I feel like I can count all of my Minneapolis friends on one hand. But when I step back and think about it, I realize how lucky I am to have these few new friends because in the span of just a few months, they’ve turned into family.

It’s only a few times in your life where you meet someone and it’s instantly easy. It was easy when I met my best friend back on the first week of 10th grade and when I met my sorority sister turned real life sister-in-law in college. It was easy when I met my very best teacher friend on the first day of new teacher orientation my first year in Nashville and when we moved to Seattle where we found friends who we could make curry chicken tacos with on a Sunday afternoon in our pajamas. And lucky me, I found it again here in Minneapolis.

I’ve decided, as I get older, that I would way rather have a handful of friends that I can call no matter what, who can hang out on our couch and watch the Bachelorette or make biscotti with than a million acquaintances.

homemade Italian-style biscotti

My Minneapolis BFF and I had a cookie baking day last week where we used a ridiculous amount of butter and made a giant mess in my kitchen. Oh, and we made these biscotti.

These are a traditional Italian-style biscotti (adapted from Emiko Davies’ most recent book Torte Della Nonna), studded with toasted hazelnuts, clementine juice and zest, and big hunks of dark chocolate. They are super easy to adapt with whatever nut + citrus + chocolate combination you prefer and make a great Christmas cookie since they only get better as the days go by.

Like all Italian biscotti, these cookies are twice-baked. After mixing all of our wet and dry ingredients together into a fairly dense dough, we turn it out on a floured work surface and knead it a bit to make sure all of the flour bits are incorporated. Then we’ll sprinkle in our add-ins and knead it a bit more to ensure even distribution. The dough is then shaped into two rectangular logs, brushed with egg wash and baked until deeply golden brown. The logs cool for a few minutes and then we’ll use a sharp serrated knife to cut individual cookies. The long cookies are then baked again to ensure maximum crunchiness.

tips and substitutions

Maybe it’s the little Florida baby in me, but I love citrus season so much. There’s something about how in the darkest, coldest, parts of winter we get to reap the brightest bits of produce that just makes me giddy. I started seeing blood oranges and mandarins pop up in my grocery stores a few weeks ago, so you can bet that when I found a big bag of beautiful clementines, I jumped on it. You can easily substitute whatever citrus juice and zest looks the most exciting to you if you can’t find clementines.

I do have a small disclaimer about this recipe—slicing the biscotti will cause your chocolate to smear a bit. (This is why many biscotti recipes only incorporate nuts or dried fruits and then dip the cookies in chocolate after baking, but I really really wanted the chocolate scattered throughout). It’s inevitable that slicing the warm cookie log will cause the hot chocolate puddles to smear. I think it’s a small price to pay for having little pockets of chocolate studded throughout the final cookie, but if that really bothers you, you can absolutely omit the chocolate in the cookie dough and then melt your chocolate and dip your cooled cookies in it post-bake.

Chocolate Espresso Crinkle Cookies

It’s Day 2 of 12 Days of Christmas Desserts and a beautiful day for cookies. I don’t know about you, but my Instagram and Pinterest feeds have been inundated with Christmas cookies since the end of November. Little gingerbread people decorated with little royal icing outfits, very-structurally sound gingerbread greenhouses, and cookie boxes galore. My problem with Christmas cookies in general is that often, the prettier the cookie, the less delicious it is. (I know that this is a very broad stereotype, but I’ve found that 9 times out of 10, that’s the case.) When I was in culinary school, our pastry cohort spent six months building an entire gingerbread village. The finished product was intricate and detailed and absolutely amazing, but completely inedible. I’m not here for all of that. I like unassuming Christmas cookies with chewy centers and crunchy outsides. The slightly less-cute cookies are always the most delicious.

These chocolate espresso crinkle cookies definitely fall into that not as cute Christmas cookie category, but they deserve a place in your repertoire. A fudgy, brownie like interior is packed with dark chocolate and espresso and then each cookie is rolled in powdered sugar for that just-took-a-dip-in-freshly-packed-snow look. A Christmas classic. These also freeze beautifully, just wait to roll them in powdered sugar until just before baking.

Chocolate Espresso Crinkle Cookies

makes 24-28 cookies

Ingredients

11 oz (312 g) dark chocolate, chopped 

1 stick (113 g; 4 oz) unsalted butter, cubed

1 tbsp instant espresso powder

1 cup (240 g; 8.4 oz) granulated sugar

1/2 cup (100 g; 3.4 oz ) light brown sugar

2 tsp vanilla extract

4 eggs

2 cups (290 g; 10.3 oz) all purpose flour

2 tbsp (14 g) dark cocoa powder

1/2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp kosher salt

1/2 cup powdered sugar, sifted

Procedure 

1. In a medium-sized heatproof bowl set over a double boiler, melt the chocolate, butter, and instant espresso. When completely melted and combined, set aside to cool slightly.

2. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, combine sugar, brown sugar, eggs, and vanilla. Whip on medium-high speed until the mixture is light in color and slightly thickened. (You should be able to pull the whisk out of the bowl and the mixture should leave a ribbon-like mark in the mixture.)

3. In a small bowl, whisk together flour, cocoa powder, salt, baking powder, and baking soda.

4. Switch from the whisk attachment to the paddle attachment and gradually add the dry ingredients, with the mixer on low speed. Be sure to scrape down the sides of the bowl frequently and mix until just combined.

5. Keep the mixer on low speed and stream in melted chocolate mixture. Increase speed to medium and mix until just combined (about 30 seconds). Use the rubber spatula to continue gently folding the mixture until all one color. Be careful not to overmix, but you want to ensure that everything is homogenized.

6. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least an hour, and up to overnight.

7. When you’re ready to bake, preheat the oven to 350 degrees F and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Using either a medium or large cookie scoop, portion cookies, rolling each one in powdered sugar before placing on prepared tray, leaving about 2” of space between them because they will spread a little.

8. Bake for 8-10 minutes for smaller cookies, 10-12 minutes for larger cookies. Let cookies cool at least 5 minutes on the pan before transferring to a cooling rack.

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