12 Stunning Cookies That Will Impress Everyone You Know (Published 2020) (2024)

To make these dazzling cookies, inspired by the artist Ellsworth Kelly, cover 20 peppermint-flavored sugar cookies with royal icing, arrange them in a tight grid, paint lines of color across them, and then rearrange to serve.

Recipe: Peppermint Stripe Cookies

A giant crumbly peanut cookie topped with airy honeycomb and lashed with dark chocolate, this recipe is especially good if you love salty-sweet flavors. Break off shards to serve.

Recipe: Peanut Shortbread With Honeycomb

These crinkles are irresistible warm from the oven, when the chocolate chips inside are still luxuriously liquidy. They then cool to a fudgy, chewy, brownielike texture — if any manage to stay around that long.

Recipe: Gingery Brownie Crinkle Cookies

Inky black tahini gives these cookies their dark swirl, sandy texture and nutty taste. Inspired by real marble slabs, they are intrinsically decorative without any icing or other extras — save for a crunchy black sanding-sugar edge.

Recipe: Marbled Tahini Cookies

These cookie sticks are inspired by Pocky, the machine-made Japanese treat. They don’t pretend to be the perfectly straight version from the box, but they taste far better. Coat them with dark chocolate, milk chocolate or white chocolate tinged with matcha or raspberry.

Recipe: Homemade Pocky

These rosemary-lemon sugar cookies are coated with lemony glaze; sprinkled with pistachios, freeze-dried raspberries, rose petals and pomegranate seeds; and then drizzled with a bit of pink glaze. Each one looks like a little abstract painting, no special skills required.

Recipe: Abstract Art Cookies

Use cast-iron cookie stamps to leave imprints on this beautifully textured shortbread. Tangy orange and lemon zests flavor both the dough and the buttery glaze that’s applied to the still-warm cookies.

Recipe: Stamped Citrus Shortbread

Baked as one large-format cookie and then cut or broken into pieces, this recipe takes almost no time to make. If you think you don’t like anise seeds, think again: They add a fragrant note that will keep you coming back.

Recipe: Brown Sugar-Anise Cookies

These thumbprints are packed with flavor from three types of freshly toasted nuts, each paired with its own filling: pecans with dulce de leche, hazelnuts with Nutella, and pistachios with a pool of red currant jelly.

Recipe: Thumbprints With Dulce de Leche, Nutella or Jam

The classic linzer cookie provided inspiration, but this sandwich cookie is loaded with poppy seeds and has an elegant slick of blood orange marmalade. The wide “window frames” are much bigger than the “eyes” on linzer cookies, the better to show off the jewel-like filling.

Recipe: Blood Orange Poppy Seed Window Cookies

This cakey cookie nearly explodes through its sugary crust. The name is a nod to the coffee-bar creation in which a shot of espresso tops off a cup of chai; the final product is right at home on a holiday cookie plate, with its festive cinnamon, cardamom, ginger and cloves.

Recipe: Dirty Chai Earthquake Cookies

These simply iced sugar cookies are also inspired by Ellsworth Kelly, but this time by his work “Nine Colors,” which he made by cutting out circles of colored paper and mounting them to a background. Find a square tin that will fit the cookies in rows of three, and stack them three or four high.

Recipe: Color-Field Cookies

Designed and produced by Adriana Ramic, Krysten Chambrot, Kim Gougenheim, Alexa Weibel and Emily Weinstein

Recipes and styling by Susan Spungen

Photographs by Con Poulos for The New York Times; prop styling by Paige Hicks; additional production by Jessica White.

Videos produced by Vaughn Vreeland and Scott Loitsch; additional editing by Pierce Abernathy; production assistance and sound by Gina Fernandez