Christmas
1676 recipes found
No-Bake Chocolate Clusters
These little cookies are a bunch of good things all at once: crunchy and chewy, sweet and salty, craggy and never neat, or ever the same, which is just as they should be. The must-have ingredients are melted chocolate, either dark or white (or both), and cornflakes. The coconut is optional, and the cranberries are up for grabs — you can swap them for raisins or small bits of other dried fruit. Since these require nothing but melting and stirring, and because the ingredients are so basic, these can be a spur-of-the-moment cookie, a boon when there’s often not enough time.
Buttery Almond Cookies
Made with high-fat, cultured butter, these melt-in-your-mouth almond cookies are like the most tender shortbread you’ve ever eaten. A simple confectioners’ sugar icing and a sliced almond topping make them especially pretty, but you can skip the garnish for something sleeker and simpler. Or use them to make sandwich cookies, filling them with the likes of lemon curd, raspberry jam or melted chocolate.
Gingerbread House
Here is all you need to know to build a gingerbread house: a delicious recipe, instructions for assembly, and a printable template provided by Nina Cooke John, a Manhattan architect. The recipe came to us from Genevieve Meli, the pastry chef at Il Buco Alimentari in Manhattan, and it works just as well for cookies as it does for a gingerbread house. This recipe makes one small house, so you may consider doubling the recipe for a larger structure, but note: only one recipe at a time will fit in the bowl of a standard stand mixer, so plan ahead. (Ms. Cooke John and Ms. Meli also built a gingerbread structure for us, and you can watch that here.)
Crunchy Coconut Twists
At first glance, these long, skinny cookies look a lot like savory cheese straws, the kind of thing you’d nibble with cocktails. But those golden shreds are coconut, not Cheddar, embedded in store-bought puff pastry and coated with sugar. They’re crunchy, caramelized, and look dramatic on a cookie plate. Try to seek out all-butter pastry for the richest flavor. And if you come across chocolate puff pastry, even better!
Italian Ricotta Cookies
Jessica Hulett’s tender, cakey ricotta cookies taste like the white part of the best black and white cookie you've ever had. The recipe comes from Ms. Hulett’s grandmother Dorie, who used to flavor the cookies with anise, if she used flavoring at all. Adding lemon zest gives the cookies a fragrant brightness. We approve.
Chocolate Whiskey Cake
This recipe came to The Times from Marti Buckley Kilpatrick, who adapted it from Dol Miles, the pastry chef at Frank Stitt’s Bottega restaurant in Birmingham, Ala. Ms. Kilpatrick describes the cake as an ugly frog of a confection, but promises that anyone willing to bet a kiss on its excellence would be amply rewarded. The interplay of coffee, black pepper and cloves is subtle but powerful, and results in a deeply flavored, moist confection that comes together quickly. It’s just delicious.
Piparkakut
In 2009, The New York Times asked readers to send photos and recipes of their holiday cookies. About 100 people answered the call, including Naomi Donabedian, a graphic designer who lived in Brooklyn. She submitted this recipe for piparkakut, a Finnish cookie that incorporates cloves, black pepper, cardamom, ground ginger and orange zest. She wrote of the “big 3D flavor” imparted by freshly ground cardamom, but you can use pre-ground cardamom if you like. The dough can be difficult to roll out, but keep at it. This crisp, delicate, aromatic cookie will be your reward.
Spicy Crab Dip
This style of crab dip, often referred to as Maryland crab dip because of its Chesapeake Bay origins, makes for a festive appetizer. Here, it’s served hot out of the oven and is extra creamy thanks to the combination of cream cheese and a little mayonnaise. Though crabs are plentiful this time of year — and you can certainly make this with freshly steamed and picked meat if you’d like — canned lump crabmeat makes this dish simple to assemble. Just be careful to leave the clumps of meat as intact as possible when mixing. A sprinkle of cayenne pepper and a generous douse of hot sauce add heat to this flavorful dish.
Linzer Cookies
Lightly spiced, jam-filled linzer cookies (a smaller version of the classic linzer torte) are a traditional sandwich cookie with a tender texture and subtle nutty flavor that comes from finely ground almonds in the dough. As with sugar cookies, which benefit from the addition of frosting, the dough for a linzer does not need to be too sweet: It's filled with a tangy raspberry jam and finished with plenty of powdered sugar. A hole in the top of the cookie gives the signature stained-glass-window effect, making it one of the most effortless and impressive treats you could make this holiday season.
Chocolate Babka Rugelach
These festive, fudgy confections are a mash-up of two traditional Jewish favorites: rugelach and chocolate babka. They have a tender, flaky pastry wrapped around a bittersweet truffle-like filling that’s sprinkled with chopped nuts or cocoa nibs for a contrasting crunch. A topping of Demerara sugar adds texture, and a little flaky sea salt cuts the sweetness perfectly. These are best served within five days of baking (store them in an airtight container at room temperature). They also freeze well for up to one month, with parchment or waxed paper between layers.
Potato Chip-Chocolate Chip Cookies
A mix of salty potato chips and chocolate chips gives these shortbread cookies a playful, sweet and savory appeal. Adapted from Shauna Sever’s cookbook, “Midwest Made,” these cookies taste best one day after baking, when the flavors have had a chance to meld. They will last for 3 to 4 days stored airtight at room temperature. Bring them to your next bake sale and watch them sell out in a flash. If you don’t have European-style cultured butter on hand, regular unsalted butter will also work.
Millionaire’s Shortbread
Plain shortbread, a combination of the most basic ingredients in the baker’s pantry, is an understated sweet, but millionaire’s shortbread is a spectacle. It’s a flashy cookie, topped with swoops of chocolate and chewy caramel made from condensed milk, butter and Lyle’s Golden Syrup. A British confection made from cane sugar, Lyle’s is found near the honey and maple syrup in any well-stocked supermarket, but if you can't find it, corn syrup makes a fine, if slightly less flavorful, substitute.
Chocolate-Peanut Butter Swirl Cookies
These are like those three-ingredient peanut butter cookies everyone loves, but with a little cocoa powder and bittersweet chocolate thrown in to make them fancy. You only need five ingredients and a bit of elbow grease to put them together. While semisweet chocolate (in bar or chip form) would certainly work here, bittersweet chocolate is a better choice. The darker chocolate, along with the cocoa powder, adds a fruity bitterness that contrasts nicely with the sweet peanut butter.
Fudgy Bourbon Balls
This twist on a classic rum ball recipe substitutes chocolate cookies for the usual vanilla wafers, and features bourbon rather than rum. The flavors will mellow and integrate after sitting for a few days, so the cookies will be all the better if you can plan ahead and let them ripen for three or four days. They’ll keep for up to two weeks stored at room temperature.
Ginger Chocolate Cake
Crème fraîche enriches this flourless cake, and dark cocoa powder bolsters its chocolate flavor. Both fresh and dry ginger add a nuance of heat and spice that show why ginger pairs so well with chocolate. Even though this cake is wonderful on its own, unsweetened crème fraîche dolloped on top and chewy, citrusy clementine confit takes this into a very sophisticated neighborhood.
Chocolate Gingerbread Cake
This cozy spiced loaf cake gets a triple dose of ginger – ground, fresh and crystallized – and the totally delicious addition of chocolate. A pour of molasses and an assortment of other warm spices help round out the flavors, and buttermilk makes it extra moist. Serve slightly warm slices of this gingerbread with a bit of vanilla ice cream for a simple and satisfying dessert. Bonus: Baking this cake will make your house smell amazing.
Hibiscus-Spiraled Ginger Cookies
Floral hibiscus and citrus zest, along with coarse sugar, make up a delightful swirl in a buttery shortbread dough with contrasting textures from chewy candied ginger and caramelized raw sugar. Every bite of this cookie is suffused with delicately sweet flavors, which are complemented by a slight fruity tang. For the prettiest spiral, make sure to roll your log tightly. The log can be wrapped and frozen for up to one month, or refrigerated for up to three days, then sliced and baked without thawing.
Chocolate-Molasses Cookies
All you need to shape this dead simple dough are your hands (and maybe a helper or two). Decidedly more “grown up” in flavor — both the molasses and cocoa give bitter notes that play off the spiciness of the fresh ginger — the cookies are tiny in size by design to complement their intensity. For rolling, any coarse decorative sugar works, as would Demerara or an unrefined sugar.
Chocolate Little Layer Cake
This recipe came to The New York Times in 2009 from Martha Meadows of somewhere between Slocomb and Hartford, Ala., where the worth of a cook can be measured in cake layers. In this corner of the country, everyone knows whose cakes are tender and whose consistently reach 12 thin layers or more. Ms. Meadows learned to bake 15-layer cakes from her mother, who cooked each layer one at a time in a cast-iron hoe-cake pan. The cake is frosted with warm boiled chocolate icing. Here is our tribute to that.
Savory Mixed-Nut Shortbread
Inspired by the cocktail nuts served at Union Square Cafe in New York City — butter-rich, toasty warm and fragrant with rosemary and cayenne — this no-mixer press-in cookie is a joy to make. You simply melt butter with rosemary and black pepper, stir that into dry ingredients, and then press the dough into a pan. Salted nuts and more fresh rosemary go on top before the whole thing is baked and broken into ragged pieces. Persnickety cookie, this is not. Enjoy on a cheese board, with cocktails or after dinner with tea and dark chocolate. Or pack these in a cellophane bag and tie it with a bow to share as a gift. (The cookies will keep in an airtight container at room temperature for up to a week.)
Frosted Holiday Sugar Cookies
Whether you're making Santas or dreidls, shamrocks or bunnies, this foolproof cookie and royal icing recipe is the only one you need. Don't skip chilling the dough after rolling it out. It really helps the cookies keep their shape while baking. And if you'd like to frost the cookies very generously, consider doubling the icing amounts below.
Double Apple Pie
This recipe is a keeper. Gently spiced with cinnamon, tinged with brown sugar and loaded with apple butter, it’s as deeply flavored as an apple pie can be, all covered with a buttery wide-lattice top crust. Although it’s at its most ethereal when baked on the same day you serve it, it’s still wonderful made a day ahead. (Don't let making your own pie crust intimidate you: our pie guide has everything you need to know.)
Doris’s Salty Hot Fudge
This recipe came to The Times from Doris Muramatsu, a musician with the band Girlyman. It takes about 15 minutes to make and is particularly terrific over ice cream with some spicy pecans chopped on top. It is also an easily made token of true friendship and cheer: pour some into small jars and give it to friends.
Pear-Pomegranate Pie
In this welcome departure from the traditional apple pie, a combination of Anjou and Bosc pears are caramelized in a mixture of pomegranate molasses and butter, then combined with a smaller portion of fresh, uncooked pears. The whole glorious mess is then dumped into an all-butter crust and baked until tender. The happy result is a pie that's soft and sweet, tangy and toothsome, and oh so good. (Don't let making your own pie crust intimidate you: our pie guide has everything you need to know.)