Our 2025 Cookie Week Recipes Are Here

This yr’s Cookie Week recipes are inspired by the flavors of treats we love, like mint chocolate chip ice cream, Vietnamese coffee and gingery Dark ’n’ Stormy cocktails.

This year’s Cookie Week recipes are inspired by the flavors of treats we love, like mint chocolate chip ice cream, Vietnamese coffee and gingery Dark ’n’ Stormy cocktails.

By Vaughn Vreeland

Photographs by Rachel Vanni

Styled by Samantha Seneviratne and Megan Hedgpeth

Vaughn Vreeland is a supervising video producer for NYT Cooking. An avid baker and home cook hailing from North Carolina, Vaughn can be seen making his latest creations on the NYT Cooking YouTube channel, Instagram and TikTok.

Published Dec. 1, 2025Updated Dec. 1, 2025

What’s better than a Dark ’n’ Stormy cocktail, buzzing with ginger and lime and rum? Maybe nothing — or maybe a ginger cookie that distills all that drink’s flavors into big, chewy bites.

Cookie Week, New York Times Cooking’s annual holiday baking tradition, is back. This year, we’re baking our favorite sweet and savory cravings into seven festive treats, with recipes and videos to accompany them.

Delight in brownies that taste like Vietnamese iced coffee, savor the flavors of a coconut cake in a bright, bite-size package, or treat yourself to some mint chocolate chip (shortbreads, not ice cream). But don’t forget to have fun — the holidays are all about having your cookie and eating it, too.

Channel a night at the movies … into a cookie! My recipe takes all the fun of your favorite concession-stand players and bakes them right into and atop a simple sugar dough. Toffee bits feature in a supporting role, never overshadowing the stars (the popcorn and candy, of course). Feel free to play around with the mix, but make sure your popcorn (microwave or stovetop) is freshly popped for a crisper and more even coating.

Don’t worry: These cookies only look like slices of mortadella. Claire Saffitz’s recipe — a new twist on classic “sausage” cookies like chocolate kolbasa from Eastern Europe or the salami cookie that Brooks Headley has served at Superiority Burger in New York — absolutely nails the cold cut’s appearance. Freeze-dried strawberries yield the ruddy pink color of the original, while pistachios play the roll of, well, pistachios.

Samantha Seneviratne’s Cookie Week entry takes the essentials of a towering coconut cake — the buttery crumb and billowy frosting — and shrinks them down into the cutest tiny treat. Sweetened shredded coconut and unrefined coconut oil (for the most coconutty essence) in the dough are the source of the signature flavor, while a finish in glaze and more shredded coconut — tinted in whatever color you like — gives the cookies their bright flourish.

Eric Kim’s easy, fun-to-make cookies taste and feel as if you’re eating mint-chip ice cream, thanks to peppermint extract and its icy cooling effect. A crisp-tender sugar-cookie base — made without a mixer — is topped with a layer of minty white chocolate that’s thinned out with olive oil. Dark chocolate shavings lend bitterness to balance the sweetness.

Inspired by Payday bars, Sue Li’s simple treat mimics the flavor of the candy’s caramel nougat center through a brown butter-infused dough. Once shaped, the dough is then rolled generously in salted roasted peanuts for crunch and an irresistible nod to the candy.

Melissa Clark took the bittersweet elements of Vietnamese coffee — espresso and sweetened condensed milk — and turned them into brownies. Instant espresso in the brownie batter gives them a pronounced coffee flavor. But second to eating them, the joy is in combining the cream cheese topping, speckled with coffee beans, and chocolaty base into a stunning swirl, evoking the image of milk hitting coffee just so.

The Dark ’n’ Stormy is a festive, fiery cocktail made with spicy ginger beer, warm dark rum and a refreshing hint of lime — a welcome wake-up for your taste buds. Dan Pelosi’s recipe riff on it is no different. Cayenne joins the classic spice mix of ginger, cloves and cinnamon, and candied ginger, infused with dark rum, is mixed in. It’s all finished with a tart, refreshing lime-and-rum glaze. But perhaps the best part is that, unlike the cocktail, there’s no limit to how many you can consume.

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