Pellau Magazine: 7 Craveable Cookies from O, The Oprah Magazine

7 Craveable Cookies from O, The Oprah Magazine

9:13 PM | Posted by Pellau | Edit Post

It's time to revive the cookie bake-and-swap. What better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than at home with your friends, shooting the breeze and baking up a sweet-scented array of homemade cookies? Plus, you spend the money and energy to make one type of cookie and you get a mix-and-match bag of your favorites in return. Each of the following cookie recipes from O, The Oprah Magazine is guaranteed delicious and makes a great holiday gift, if you don't mind parting with them.

Sweet and Salty Cookies

Chocolate chip cookies get a grown-up upgrade when you add salty, crunchy pumpkin seeds and a dash of spicy chili flake.

Recipe: Sweet and Salty Cookies

Cornmeal Biscotti with Cranberries and Pistachios

The owner of San Francisco's farm-to-table grocery store Bi-Rite, Sam Mogannam knows a thing or two about buying the best ingredients. In his cookbook, Bi-Rite Market's Eat Good Food, he shares his insider knowledge and gives terrific recipes for what to do with the bounty — like dipping these biscotti in top quality chocolate.

Recipe: Cornmeal Biscotti with Cranberries and Pistachios

Compost Cookies

"Compost cookies always turn out great in my mother's kitchen because she infamously has a hodgepodge of mix-ins, none in great enough quantity to make an actual single-flavored cookie on its own," says Christina Rosi. "My brother-in-law calls them 'garbage cookies"'; others call them 'kitchen sink cookies.' Call them what you want and make them as we make them at Milk Bar or add your own favorite snacks to the cookie base in place of ours.

Recipe: Compost Cookies

Parisian Macarons

Meg Ray, the owner of San Francisco's Parisian-inspired pastry shop Miette, shares the secrets to her delightful confections in her first cookbook, which is named after the shop. The book's carefully photographed step-by-step instructions make a dome-shaped Princess cake, a lime meringue tart, and picture-perfect macarons doable, not daunting. Shown here: plain macarons with lemon buttercream and a chocolate macaron with vanilla buttercream.

Recipe: Parisian Macarons

Peppermint Sticks

Ever wish you could make all your cookies look as good as they taste? In the book Art of the Cookie, food stylist Shelly Kaldunski teaches tricks of the trade to making professional-looking treats like these ethereal candy-cane-inspired tuiles.

Recipe: Peppermint Sticks

Ribbon Cookies

Pastry chef Tracey Zabar considers cookies the perfect end to any meal, and in her cookbook One Sweet Cookie, she set out to collect the "best of the best" cookie recipes from 70 celebrated chefs. These playful knots from pastry chef Jerry Thornton are lightly fried and finished with a dusting of cinnamon sugar for a fanciful addition to a cookie platter.

Recipe: Ribbon Cookies