Five Christmas Cookie Recipes You’ll Thank Us For

Christmas is just around the corner! It’s time for holiday gatherings, festive lights, and of course, great food. Part of the holiday spread at almost everyone’s home this time of year is a big tray of buttery, sugary Christmas cookies. The most traditional Christmas cookies are sugar cookies or possibly gingerbread ones, baked in fun shapes and decorated with colorful, sweet icing or frosting. They certainly look great, and making them is a fun project to do with a few friends or even with the kids, but their taste? Well, let’s just say they’re usually a little bland.

It’s not always sugar cookies, though; sometimes Christmas cookie plates include things like seasonal fruitcake cookies, or the standard chocolate chip cookies, or maybe something a little more exotic like macaroons or jam centers. Still, the varieties are usually pretty predictable from one year to the next.

Why not shake things up a bit this year for your cookie trays and cookie exchanges? These five cookie recipes are just as festive as the ho hum sugar cookies, but they pack a lot more flavor and are a wonderful break from the ordinary. Plus, they’re sure to be a hit at your holiday gatherings, and they’re perfect to wrap and give as gifts. Here are five out of the ordinary Christmas cookie recipes you’ll thank us for.

Italian Rainbow Cookies

These intensely almond flavored, jewel like bar cookies are a longtime standard of New York City bakeries, but they’re pretty scarce in the rest of the country. So what’s a cookie lover to do? Make them at home, of course! They are a bit labor intensive, but most recipes for rainbow cookie make a lot (usually at least four dozen), so you get a lot of bang for your buck.

Recipes very a bit from one to the next, but they all call for at least half a pound of almond paste, some apricot jam, and food coloring in red, yellow, and green. Oh, and you’ll need chocolate of either the dark or bittersweet variety to enrobe long strips of the bars before they get dried and sliced. The marzipan and chocolate flavor combination, with just a hint of apricot, is sweet and addictive, and when they’re layered and assembled, they look like little flags covered in chocolate. Your friends and family will love them, and if you want to keep some for yourself, they freeze remarkably well. Some good rainbow cookie recipes to try include Lidia Bastianich’s, Smitten Kitchen’s, and this one from Epicurious.

Compost Cookies

New York City has lots of amazing bakeries, and one of its most revered is the Momofuku Milk Bar. This Manhattan institution is famous for all sorts of incredible sweet creations, including the awesomely named crack pie, cereal milk ice cream, and their practically famous compost cookies. Don’t be fooled by the name, though; these cookies don’t contain anything even close to vegetable scraps and egg shells. Instead, they’re a luscious combination of sweet and savory, crispy and chewy, chocolatey and salty. Even better, you don’t even have to trek to New York City and drop a small fortune to get them — you can make your own!

Upon first glance, the ingredient list for compost cookies may look a bit like too much of a good thing: chocolate chips and butterscotch chips and oats and pretzels and potato chips? (Yes! Potato chips!) But trust us: this is one cookie you don’t want to miss. It’s absolutely delicious, and it’s highly unlikely that anyone else at your cookie exchange will make something that’s even remotely close in flavor. What’s more, you can switch up the ingredients without compromising the final product at all. Want to add cornflakes? Go ahead. Double up the chocolate? Good idea. Don’t have any pretzels? No worries. Use what you have, bake them according to the recipe (don’t forget to refrigerate the dough for a few hours before sticking the cookies in the oven), and enjoy this most unusual but most tasty cookie that’s bound to become a new Christmas tradition. You can find the recipe right on the Milk Bar’s website.

Fluffernutter Cookies

Quick: what was your favorite sandwich when you were a kid? If you were like most of us, you loved and even craved that sweet and luscious lunchtime treat known as the fluffernutter. And what’s not to like? It’s rich peanut butter and gooey marshmallow fluff spread on cottony white bread — it’s more like dessert, and yet our moms used to pack it in our lunchboxes next to packs of Cheetos and thermoses full of Kool-Aid.

The fluffernutter may not be as popular as a lunchtime main in our current health conscious times, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the same flavor combination in another way, like a fluffernutter cookie. There are a few ways to approach the fluffernutter in this way, but every approach is always some variation of a peanut butter cookie with the inclusion of either marshmallows or marshmallow fluff. They’re all delicious, and they’re definitely a step up from the peanut butter kiss cookies that seem to be popular this time of year. As for fluffernutter cookie recipes, check out this one from Betty Crocker that uses a box of peanut butter cookie mix as its base, or this super simple one from Food52, or this one that’s both vegan and gluten free.

Yakgwa (Korean Flower Cookies)

Who says Christmas cookies have to be exclusively American in origin? After all, Mexican tea cakes and German pfeffernusse are eminently popular for the holidays. This year, why not try Christmas cookies with an Asian flair, such as these gorgeous and delectable Korean flower cookies called Yakgwa?

Their flavor profile is an unusual but no less delicious one of honey and sesame. They’re sticky, slightly delicate, and pleasantly chewy thanks to their unusual means of preparation: they’re fried rather than baked. (Yes! A fried cookie!) Yakgwa are often decorated with pignoli, or pine nuts, in a lovely flower design. They defy all logic regarding what a Christmas cookie should be, but they’re so good that you won’t care. Check out this easy to follow recipe from the Honey & Butter blog, and give Yakgwa a try this year.

Rugelach

OK, so technically, rugelach aren’t even cookies — they’re small pastries. And they’re not exactly Christmas cookies either, since they’re Jewish in origin. Still, you’d be hard pressed to find a person of any religious persuasion who does not love this delicate layered treat!

There are a few different flavor combinations you can use with rugelach. Apricot and nuts and maybe raisins are tasty, as is chocolate and raspberry. Both flavors form a heavy spring of brown sugar and cinnamon, so you get a treat that’s sweet, fruity, and either nutty or chocolatey (or both, just because you can). To form these wonderful rolled pastries, you can roll a long log of rugelach and cut them into individual cookies, though the best and flakiest rugelach are typically individually rolled like crescent rolls. They take a while to make, for sure, but their taste and texture are undeniably amazing. Add some variety to your Christmas cookie trays this year with this recipe from Ina Garten (aka the Barefoot Contessa), this one from The Kitchn, or this one from Serious Eats.