We asked some of our favorite Cooking Channel faces to create cookies for us to celebrate the holiday season. The result? This sugar-fueled spread of nutty, jammy, chocolatey treats in all shapes and sizes.
White Chocolate Peppermint Cookies
If you crushed up Christmastime and baked it into –– and sprinkled it on top of –– a cookie, this would be it. G. Garvin combines snow-white white chocolate chips and crushed peppermint candies in these uber-soft cookies, then decorates them with a flurry of extra candy for a festive red-and-white snow.
Oatmeal raisin (and many) cookies fall into two distinct camps: crunchy and crumbly. But these cookies from Kelsey Nixon are fall-apart-in-your-hands soft and gooey. In a clever twist, she pulses the raisins in a food processor along with all the other ingredients, creating the sort of raisin swirl you might find in a cinnamon-raisin bagel. Old-fashioned oats give the cookies just enough heft and chewiness to let you linger over each bite a little longer.
These colorful confections are believed to have originated in the early 1900s, created by Italian immigrant communities in the United States in homage to the Italian flag. Debi Mazar and Gabriele Corcos' chocolate-covered almond sponge cake cookies with cherry and apricot preserves nail the classic layered creations on their Old World-New York head.
Nadia G packs her usual punch into these boozy vanilla wafer, walnut and cocoa powder balls. The recipe contains a whopping 1/2 cup of tequila and is dusted with both chipotle and cayenne powders, so it's not for the faint of stomach. They're perfect for a carousing holiday celebration, for gifting or for bringing to a cookie swap (the recipe makes 42 balls).
Lemon Curd and Stem Ginger White Chocolate Chip Cookies
Ching-He Huang never disappoints with her creative Asian-inspired twists on traditional cookies. Here, she adds stem ginger (young ginger that's been preserved in a sugar syrup and canned) and lemon curd to cookie batter to add spicy, citrus notes. White chocolate chips keep these cookies sweet and holiday appropriate.
Chuck Hughes offers a tropical, fruity take on his popular red velvet whoopie pies by swapping out that cream cheese frosting for a coconut cream and adding a hint of cherry flavor to the cookie halves. Dotted with syrup-drenched cherries and rolled in toasted coconut slivers, these cookie sandwiches are far from holiday traditional.
Bring a bit of Parisian flair to your holiday celebration with Julia Baker's Pistachio Macarons. The cookies themselves are tinted this festive shade of green and are filled with (and flavored by) a homemade caramelized pistachio cream –– the kind ever present throughout France during the Christmas season.
Sometimes all you need is a classic pairing like peanut butter and chocolate. Roger Mooking's peanut butter cookies are filled with giant chocolate chip chunks and salty roasted peanuts, so they've got that perfect salty-sweet, chewy-soft balance. Dust them with either cocoa powder or confectioners' sugar (or half and half) to give them a festive snowy finish (and an extra hint of flavor).
