16 Care Package Holiday Cookie Recipes That Stay Delicious Even After Shipping

Care packages are a great way to show someone that you’re thinking of them, and you can’t send a holiday care package without throwing in some homemade cookies. The problem is that lots of cookies are only good for a couple days after baking—if they’re being sent through the mail then that just won’t cut it. Fortunately, we have plenty of recipes that last long enough to make it to their destination. From classics like chocolate chip and sugar cookies to no-bake oatmeal cookies and homemade Oreos, we’ve got 16 recipes perfect for a holiday care package.

It’s just not Christmas without sugar cookies—I used to eat my weight in the ones my mom would make every year when I was a kid. The classic recipe uses a 1:2:3 ratio of sugar, fat, and flour, but we think that tastes a little too floury, so we up the amount of sugar. You can dust them with powdered sugar if you want, but I don’t think they’re right without a layer of royal icing.

These sandwich-style cookies feature a silky, pale yellow custard powder–flavored buttercream between two crumbly rectangular biscuits—essentially Britain’s answer to the Oreo. Custard powder gives the biscuits their distinctive golden yellow color and custard-like flavor, while keeping the dough cold prevents it from sticking to the cutter and helps the biscuits retain their shape and embossed detail as they bake.

You definitely can’t skip the powdered sugar here, since you can’t make snowball cookies without it. The cookies are made with an almond flavored dough and dipped in two layers of powdered sugar after coming out of the oven, the first of which melts into a glaze that helps the second stick.

While sugar cookies and snowball cookies are particularly festive, chocolate chip cookies are great all year long. We perfected our recipe through 100 tests and 1,500 cookies, eventually deciding that brown butter and an overnight rest are the way to go. The brown butter gives the cookies a toffee-like flavor and the rest ensures they have perfectly crisp edges and chewy centers.

Our gingersnaps get a pretty serious kick from both ground and freshly grated ginger, with earthy molasses and graham-y whole wheat flour providing just enough balance. These cookies are going to look and smell amazing as soon as they come out of the oven, but you need to wait two hours before digging in so that they have time to crisp up.

These cookies also have a pleasant ginger bite, but instead of the molasses-y richness of gingersnaps, they get a bright hit of flavor from lemon (zest in the dough and juice in the cream filling). We make the cookies with coconut oil rather than 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 crisp exterior, we roll them in sugar before baking.

These cookies are a lot like peanut butter cookies, but to make them, we start by pulverizing toasted hazelnuts into homemade hazelnut butter. After that’s done, you can make the dough by creaming the nut butter with regular butter and sugar, beating in an egg, and mixing in the flour. For a festive finish, drizzle the cookies with tempered chocolate after they come out of the oven.

Lebkuchen are arguably more bars than cookies, but regardless of what you call them, these German gingerbread treats are a lovely addition to a care package. Don’t think of these as normal gingerbread cookies, though—they’re also flavored with cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, allspice, cardamom, toasted nuts, and dried fruit.

If you’re not familiar with meltaways, the name tells you basically all you need to know: These incredibly light cookies really do melt as soon as they touch your tongue. Our recipe differs from most because we use tapioca starch rather than cornstarch, the latter of which we find can give the cookies a chalky texture.

Want to give someone the gift of homemade cookies but don’t feel like turning on the oven? These cookies are just what you need—all you have to do is combine sugar, milk, cocoa, and salt on the stove; mix in chocolate, peanut butter, and oats; and spoon onto a tray to set.

While I’ll always have a place in my heart for store-bought cookies, most of them just taste so artificial. This recipe hits all the same chocolate, caramel, and shortbread notes of a classic Twix bar, but with high-quality ingredients. We finish the cookies with a sprinkling of sea salt to bring out the flavors of the chocolate and caramel.

ELF cookies are named after the Keebler elf, but I don’t see why you can’t pretend they’re a nod to Santa instead. Making them at home is as easy as baking up crunchy vanilla wafers and using them to sandwich dark-chocolate frosting. We cut our cookies with a cutter that’s about one inch wide and three inches long—try to use one that’s a similar size so that the yield is right.

Our homemade version of this Little Debbie treat uses the same basic ingredients as the original—caramel, chocolate, and crisped rice—but without all the artificial stabilizers that come in the store-bought cookies. I generally prefer dark chocolate to milk chocolate, but here it gives the cookies an unpleasantly dry texture.

I mostly just think of it as the thing I always eat on airplanes, but people assure me that Biscoff has a huge following on the ground, too. The sweet speculoos cookies have a straightforward ingredient list, but the trick to nailing down the flavor is using 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 just a dash of coconut extract to the dough, which somehow makes the cookies taste extra authentic. The filling is a simple mixture of butter and sugar, which firms up perfectly as soon as you pipe it onto the wafers.

December 2017