12 Quick Cookies Recipes for the Holiday Season

My aunt Chris has been making cookies for Christmas since before I can remember, first a handful of recipes for the family to enjoy before we all left for mass on Christmas Eve, then more — a lot more — at a standalone event a week or more before Christmas Day. In different years, she’s overseen as many as 14 varieties baked in a single day (using a single oven), by as many as five bakers (plus children), to serve as many as 60 (or more) people. For the record: We have never even come close to running out of cookies.

While the result is undoubtedly a colorful and delicious cornucopia of sugar and butter, what’s most impressive to me is the logistics of the marathon baking day itself. That is, wrangling the people, mixing bowls, ingredients, oven temperatures, spatulas, and cooling racks so that everything is done in time for our dinner of takeout Peruvian chicken, yet another family tradition. Key to our scrappy, one-day-a-year cookie processing plant are simple, quick cookie recipes like these. For every batch of pâte à choux, there’s also a peanut butter cookie we could make with our eyes closed. Lucky for us — and you — we don’t have to choose. Bake them all!

Crunchy Peanut Butter Cookies

Bridget Hallinan

These flourless peanut butter cookies pack intense flavor into every bite. The proportions are easy to remember: a cup of peanut butter, a cup of sugar, an egg, a teaspoon of baking soda. Finely chopped peanuts or mini chocolate chips can be mixed into the batter for extra crunch or chocolatey morsels.

Chewy Sugar Cookies

Food & Wine / Photo by Jacob Fox / Food Styling by Kelsey Moylan / Prop Styling by Lexi Juhl

Not the crispy sugar cookies destined for elaborate icing (time you perhaps need to spend elsewhere), this quick recipe for a chewy version of the classic cookie will yield a crunchy exterior, slightly spiced with warming nutmeg.

Dried Cranberry and Chocolate Cookies

Food & Wine / Photo by Carson Downing / Food Styling by Lauren McAnelly / Prop Styling by Sue Mitchell

A cross between a chocolate chip cookie and an oatmeal cookie, this quick best-of-both-worlds recipe folds rolled oats and dried cranberries into the brown sugar and butter–forward flavors of chocolate chip cookie dough.

Slightly Chewy Ginger Cookies

John Kernick

A toasty ginger cookie made with whole-wheat flour and sweetened with sugar and treacle, this easy recipe makes a pleasantly chewy take on shortbread.

Chewy Cinnamon-Spelt Cookies with Sea Salt

Sarah Bolla

A vegan take on snickerdoodles, this recipe incorporates nutty, flavorful grains and seeds like spelt and flax. Baked with cinnamon and topped with flaky sea salt, it’s hard to eat just one.

Basic Butter Cookies

Kristen Stevens

Butter cookies are staples of the holiday season for good reason: This easy recipe makes tender drop cookies with an unforgettably rich butter flavor in 25 minutes.