Care packages are a great way to show someone you’re thinking of them, and you can’t send a holiday care package without adding some homemade cookies. The problem is that many cookies are only good for a few days after baking – this won’t matter if they are being sent through the mail. Luckily, we have plenty of dishes that take a long time to reach their destination. From classics like chocolate chip and sugar cookies to no-bake oatmeal cookies and homemade Oreos, we’ve got 16 recipes that are perfect for holiday care packages.
It’s not Christmas without sugar cookies – when I was a kid I used to eat my weight in cookies my mom would make every year. The classic recipe uses a 1:2:3 ratio of sugar, fat and flour, but we feel it tastes a little too floury, so we increase the amount of sugar. You can sprinkle powdered sugar on them if you want, but I don’t think they are as good without a coating. Royal icing,
Serious Eats / Debbie Vee
These sandwich-style cookies feature a silky, light yellow custard with powder-flavored buttercream sandwiched between two crumb-shaped rectangular biscuits – basically Britain’s answer to the Oreo. Custard powder gives the biscuits their characteristic golden yellow color and custard-like flavour, while keeping the dough cool prevents it from sticking to the cutter and helps the biscuits retain their shape and raised details while baking.
You definitely can’t skip the powdered sugar here, because you can’t make snowball cookies without it. The cookies are made from almond flavored dough and after coming out of the oven are dipped in two layers of powdered sugar, the first layer of which melts to form a glaze that helps the second stick to it.
While sugar cookies and snowball cookies are especially festive, chocolate chip cookies are great all year long. We perfected our recipe through 100 tests and 1,500 cookies, ultimately deciding that brown butter and an overnight rest was the way to go. The brown butter gives the cookies a toffee-like flavor and the rest ensures they have perfectly crunchy edges and a chewy center.
Our Gingersnaps get great flavor from both ground and fresh ground ginger, with the earthy molasses and graham-y whole wheat flour providing just the right balance. These cookies will look and smell amazing as soon as they come out of the oven, but you’ll have to wait two hours before digging in so they have time to crisp up.
These cookies also have a pleasant ginger flavor, but instead of the molasses-richness of gingersnaps, they get a bright hit of flavor from the lemon (the zest in the dough and the juice in the cream filling). We make the cookies with coconut oil instead of butter because its more neutral flavor lets the lemon shine.
Our peanut butter cookies manage to be soft and crunchy at the same time because we start with a moist, cake-like batter and fortify it with both crunchy peanut butter and whole peanuts. To give the cookies a sweet and crispy exterior, we roll them in sugar before baking.
These cookies are a lot like peanut butter cookies, but to make them, we start by grinding roasted hazelnuts into homemade hazelnut butter. Once this is done, you can make the dough by creaming the nut butter with regular butter and sugar, beating an egg and adding it to the flour. For a festive finale, drizzle tempered chocolate over the cookies after they come out of the oven.
Lebkuchen are arguably more frequent than cookies, but no matter what you call them, these German gingerbread treats are a lovely addition to the care package. However, don’t mistake these for ordinary gingerbread cookies – they’re also flavored with cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, allspice, cardamom, roasted nuts, and dried fruits.
If you’re not familiar with Meltaways, the name basically tells you everything you need to know: These incredibly light cookies literally melt as soon as they touch your tongue. Our recipe is different because we use tapioca starch instead of cornstarch, the latter of which we feel can give the cookies a chocolatey texture.
Do you want to give someone the gift of homemade cookies but don’t feel like turning on the oven? These cookies are exactly what you need – all you need to do is mix sugar, milk, cocoa and salt on the stove; Combine chocolate, peanut butter, and oats; And spoon out onto a tray to set.
Although I will always have a place in my heart for store-bought cookies, most of them taste completely artificial. This recipe hits all the same chocolate, caramel, and shortbread notes of the classic Twix bar, but with higher quality ingredients. We finish the cookies by sprinkling sea salt to bring out the chocolate and caramel flavors.
ELF Cookies are named after the Keebler elf, but I don’t understand why you can’t pretend they’re a nod to Santa. Making these at home is as easy as baking crunchy vanilla wafers and using them to sandwich dark-chocolate frosting. We cut our cookies with a cutter that is about an inch wide and three inches long – try to use a similar size so the yield is perfect.
Our homemade version of this Little Debbie treat uses the same basic ingredients as the original – caramel, chocolate and crispy rice – but without all the artificial stabilizers that come in store-bought cookies. I generally prefer dark chocolate to milk chocolate, but here it gives the cookies an unpleasant dry texture.
I mostly just think about it because I always eat it on airplanes, but people assure me that Biscoff has a huge following on the ground too. Sweet Speculoos cookies have a straightforward ingredient list, but the trick to tone down the flavor is to use Belgian brown sugar or homemade caramel sugar instead of American brown sugar.
Giving homemade Oreos their signature jet-black color means reaching for plenty of Dutch process cocoa powder. We also add a little coconut extract to the dough, which somehow makes the cookies taste extra authentic. The filling is a simple mixture of butter and sugar, which hardens completely once piped onto the wafers.
