What's New in Holiday Cookies

Baking cookies for family and friends is a holiday tradition that never loses its appeal. But for the time-strapped holiday season, gift hunters can turn to fuss-free sweets to satiate loved ones. With creative flavors and beautiful packaging, many of these goodies are made from scratch with natural ingredients and engaging stories behind them. They're great for stocking stuffers, gift baskets, entertaining or for everyday munching. –Julie Besonen and Eva Meszaros

Cookies with a Story

1. Nikki's Cookies & Confections

 Nikki's Cookies & Confections (nikkiscookies.com) was started by Nikki Taylor, who decided that few shortbread cookies lived up to her grandmother’s English recipe. So she began in earnest to replicate that old family shortbread formula. Twenty-four years later, she has a full line of flavored shortbreads as well as chocolate layered cookies. For the holidays this year, Taylor adds to her collection peppermint snowmen, made with Wisconsin butter and pure peppermint oil, packed in festive, eye-catching boxes or snack packs, perfect for gift baskets.

Taylor keeps her operation in the family with both her mother and nephew as part of the company. Nikki’s Cookies & Confections are available online, and at upscale gift shops, grocery and department stores. Health food stores also carry Nikki's since the products are free of preservatives and trans fats.

2. Monaco Baking Company

Monaco Baking Company (monacobaking.com) also uses all-natural ingredients and hand-decorates each treat. Monaco has long been known for getting people into the holiday spirit by creating six-foot-tall gingerbread boys, gingerbread trains, carousels and gingerbread houses big enough to walk through. In a turn of events, this holiday season the company is offering Gingerbread Petites.

"It's an authentic recipe from Germany, going back to the Middle Ages," explains Monaco's  Philip Moreau. "They didn't have sugar back then, so our gingerbread is sweetened with 28 percent honey and spices (ginger, clove, allspice, cinnamon) that were discovered during Marco Polo's journeys to the Orient." Monaco has two new Petite versions for Christmas and one new Vanilla Sugar cookie for Hanukkah.

3. The Scrumptious Pantry

Like Nikki’s and Monaco’s lines, you’ll find a story behind every one of the Italian products from The Scrumptious Pantry (scrumptiouspantry.com), a small Rye, N.Y.–based business. The farmer-producers are pictured on the packaging "to show they stand behind what they grow and make," says Lee Greene, the company's founder. For Christmas she offers cantuccione, a classic Tuscan cookie loaf made with whole wheat spelt flour and dried figs. Designed for slicing into biscotti, the cantuccione can then be baked again to achieve the desired crunchiness. It's as big as a foot-long Christmas stocking, which makes it a dramatic addition to a holiday basket. Specialty shops in Illinois, California, and a few other states sell Greene’s goods. Check the website to see if they’re sold in your area.

4. Aunt Ida's 

The motto for Aunt Ida's (auntidas.com) kosher line of goods is "tradition with chutzpah," and the Los Angeles–based company proves it with a flavor twist on an old favorite. This holiday season Aunt Ida’s rolls out its sweet-and-savory Pomegranate Pistachio thumbprint butter cookies. "We say it's for Hanukkah and Christmas gift baskets," says founder Amy Goldsmith. Made with all-natural, preservative-free ingredients and bagged in cool, contemporary packaging, the cookies are inspired by Goldsmith's Aunt Ida—a Brooklyn native born in 1922, who was in turn inspired by her Sephardic friends to add tastes of the Middle East to her cooking.

"It's the only pomegranate-pistachio cookie on the market," Goldsmith notes. "Every time people try it they love it because it's so different and pretty. They're hearty cookies and you don't need to eat 50 to get satisfied." She also points out that pomegranates are mystically linked to Judaism, with the claimed 613 seeds of a pomegranate coinciding with the number of commandments in the Torah.

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