I’m not a sweets person. Given the choice between a second helping of pasta and a serving of cake, I’ll almost always opt for the pasta. Nonetheless, at any holiday party, you can find me lurking around the dessert table. Why? The anticipation of all the flavors!

But, truth be told, I’m often disappointed. Holiday cookies get pretty samey-samey, don’t they? All variations on sugar cookies (often rerolled until tough) or gingerbread men (invariably too dry). Only when I started looking outside the boundaries of the United States did I start finding cookie recipes worth hovering around the sweets table.

And so my list of holiday cookie recipes grew. Now, these aren’t Christmas cookies per se—are Americans alone in their dusting of cookie supplies during the holidays? And they aren’t necessarily 100% traditional, in that some are riffs on regional classics. Nonetheless, all these cookies offer flavors of far-off destinations and help me remember that the world can be a wide place and we can cross those oceans through flavor and celebration.

Every year I’ve made gift guides (you can find them by typing “gift guide” in the search bar on this website), but this year, I am offering you this cookie guide. Things are so complicated nowadays, aren’t they? I love the idea of filling homes with exciting scents and giving the gift of sweet treasures, made with love, this holiday.

Pro-tip for holiday cookie making: Freeze half your batter from each recipe, either as a block of dough to defrost and roll out later, or in balls that you can bake right out of the freezer (just tack on a minute or two of extra time). That way you can enjoy cookies in the weeks leading up to the holiday, and then do a massive bake of your frozen reserves for a splendid, varied platter when you need one. Which for us is always Christmas Eve.

And now, are you ready? Andiamo!

Strazzate

Italy

When we stayed in Torre Chianca in the heel of Italy’s boot, we fell in love with Bar Simone, a terrific and humble bakery/pizzeria (wow, their pizza with greens…wow) that even makes their own spumoni, those layers of molded gelato with candied nuts or other bitty tasties in between the stripes. We found excuses for a daily stop in, even on our way out of town. On that day, we noticed a cream-filled donut, called a bomba in Italy and dubbed (with a chuckle) a bombalone at Bar Simone because of its enormous size. Stretchy dough, silky cream… ahhhh. But I digress. On that last visit, the staff tossed in a couple of strazzate into our white paper bag. When we asked what they were, they shrugged. “Just taste them.” We did, and I spent the car ride to Gallipoli hunting recipes. What made these so different, and so good? The answer, I learned, is herbal liqueur. Often Strega, but Galliano is easier for us to find on this side of the pond (plus we somehow inherited a ridiculously enormous bottle—picture included here with my book beside it for scale—so we need to find reasons to get through the bottle we already have!). The liqueur adds a layer of complexity and nuance that makes you want to keep eating the cookies to figure out what is that flavor? Plus the chocolate, the almonds, the coffee… what’s not to like?

I love this recipe from Saveur Magazine. Keith declares them to be his favorite Christmas cookies ever, top honors for the strazzate. Which, for the record, originally hail from Basilicata, and made their way down the heel of the boot.

Ingredients:

2 tbsp. unsalted butter, for greasing parchment paper
1⁄2 tsp. baking powder
1 3⁄4 cups finely ground, plus 2 tbsp. roughly chopped, almonds
1 1⁄2 cups plus 2 tbsp. flour
1 cup sugar
2 tbsp. chocolate chips
1 tbsp. cocoa powder
1 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil
1⁄2 tsp. kosher salt
1⁄2 cup Strega or Galliano liqueur
1⁄2 cup coffee, at room temperature

Instructions:

Heat oven to 325°. Grease 2 parchment-lined baking sheets with butter and set aside. In a small bowl, whisk together baking powder and 1 tbsp. lukewarm water until dissolved, 20 seconds.
Combine ground and chopped almonds, flour, sugar, chocolate chips, cocoa powder, oil, and salt in a large bowl. With a wooden spoon, vigorously stir in the baking powder mixture, liqueur, and coffee to form a wet dough.
Divide the dough into 1-oz. portions. Using your hands, roll dough portions into balls and transfer to prepared baking sheets spaced about 1-inch apart. Bake until set, about 30 minutes. Transfer cookies to racks and let cool to firm before serving. I like them dusted with a bit of powdered sugar, but you do you!

Spitzbuben

Switzerland

I fell in love with these cookies during our five weeks in the Berner Oberland of Swtizerland. Wee or grand, I found them everywhere, in packages and bakeries, and even in vending machines next to pre-shredded fondue cheese and “house salami”. They became a kind of flavor soundtrack to my treks through the countryside, as I just about always had one lodged in a pocket. Who wouldn’t adore these sunny pick-me-ups, even if you don’t know that their name translates to “cheeky boys”. I particularly love this recipe from Food and Wine, as the addition of brown butter and cardamom elevates the final product. A word on preserves: I’ve made them with both cherry and apricot, and found the apricot (especially the Santa Cruz organic fruit spread available at Whole Foods) a particularly compelling counterpoint to the cookie’s lush flavorings.

You don’t need the traditional happy face cookie cutter to make these, but you can bet I’m on the hunt for them.

Ingredients:

spitzbuben recipe, swiss christmas cookies

1 1/2 cups unsalted butter (12 ounces)

3 3/4 cups all-purpose flour (about 16 ounces)
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1 vanilla bean or 1 teaspoon vanilla bean paste
1 1/2 cups packed light brown sugar
1 large egg, at room temperature
2 large egg yolks, at room temperature
Powdered sugar, for dusting
3/4 cup apricot, cherry, blueberry, or seedless raspberry jam, stirred until smooth

Instructions:

Heat butter in a large saucepan over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until butter is lightly browned and smells nutty, 6 to 8 minutes. Transfer butter to the bowl of a stand mixer; let cool completely, about 1 hour and 30 minutes.
Stir together flour, salt, baking powder, cardamom, and ginger in a medium bowl; set aside.
Split vanilla bean lengthwise, and scrape seeds into butter. Add brown sugar, and beat on medium-high speed until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Add egg, and beat until fully incorporated. Add yolks, and beat until fully incorporated. Reduce speed to low, and add flour mixture in 3 additions, beating well after each addition.
Turn dough out onto a work surface, and knead to make sure all ingredients are incorporated, 1 to 2 minutes. Divide dough in half, and shape each portion into a disk. Wrap each disk in plastic wrap, and chill until firm, about 2 hours or up to overnight (or freeze all or half!)
Preheat oven to 350°F. Remove 1 dough disk from refrigerator, and let stand at room temperature to soften slightly, about 20 minutes. Unwrap dough, and roll between 2 sheets of parchment paper to about 1/8-inch thickness. Using a 2-inch round cutter, cut out cookies, and transfer to parchment paper–lined baking sheets, leaving about 1 inch between cookies. Gather scraps once, reroll, and cut out more cookies. (Refrigerate rerolled dough before cutting if it becomes too soft.) Repeat softening, rolling, and cutting with remaining dough disk, making sure to cut the same number of cookies you cut from the first disk, or at least you want an even number in total. Using a 1-inch (about) cutter, cut the centers out of half of the cookies. Bake in preheated oven until golden brown around edges, about 10 minutes. Let cookies cool on baking sheets about 30 minutes.
Dust cutout cookies with powdered sugar. Flip remaining cookies over, and spread each with about 1 teaspoon jam. Sandwich with cutout cookies.

Šape

Serbia/Bosnia

I originally stumbled across these cookies on a website for Serbian sweets, but then found the recipe on one dedicated to Bosnian food. Food transcends arbitrary government borders, and I suspect these cookies are more indicative of a swath of Balkan land than any one country. Which makes sense if you remember my consideration of Balkan history back when we planned on settling in the region for a month (ah, those simpler days when planning an around-the-world voyage wasn’t fraught and splintered by a certain pandemic). In English, these are known as bear paws, and they do bear (ha!) some similarity to bear claws, with their flavors of nuts and honey. Though these are originally made in specific tins, you can use a madeleine pan, which I think adds even more global flair. I suppose you could also just shape these into balls and bake them, but there’s a kind of caramelization magic when the batter cooks on hot, buttered metal. These are a bit more rustic than some of the other options on this list, which I think adds a counterpoint to the more complicated rarified cookie varieties. They speak of a slower, simpler time and they taste like home, even if your home isn’t the hills and forests of the Balkans.

This recipe is adapted from Baking with Sibella, which offers loads of wanderlust recipes from the region.

Ingredients:

120 g /4.2 oz lard (or 140 g /4.9 oz butter, I used butter, I’d love it if one of you used lard and tell me how it turned out so I can see if it’s worth tracking some down!)
120 g / 4.2 oz sugar
1 vanilla sugar (or 1 tsp vanilla extract)
1 tsp finely grated lemon zest
1 egg
2 Tablespoons of honey
120 g / 4.2 oz ground walnuts
300 g / 10.5 oz / 2 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
13 g / about 1 tsp baking powder
A few tsp of milk (if needed)
Powdered sugar
Melted butter to brush the tins

Instructions:

Beat lard (or butter), sugar and vanilla for about 3-4 minutes, then add egg, lemon zest, and honey and mix for couple of more minutes.
Add ground walnuts.
Combine flour and baking powder; add to the lard mixture.
The dough will be crumbly. If too dry, add a tbsp or two milk
Brush the tins with melted butter, fill them about 2/3 with dough. If using a madeleine pan, press the dough lightly into the pan to fill each shell. They’ll rise some, but not a lot.
Place the tins on a cookie sheet and bake at 180 C / 355 F for about 15 minutes or until golden-brown color.
Let them cool down for a minute or two, remove from tins and once cool, liberally dust with powdered sugar.

Drömmar

Sweden

My friend Kamilla has an annual Christmas party where she serves all her favorite Swedish treats. It’s one of our favorite celebrations of the year. When my kids are planning their returns to Charlottesville for the holidays, they invariably ask, “Will I be home in time for Kamilla’s cookie party?” Imagine—a home, warm against the winter chill, decorated with Swedish sensibilities like beribboned straw goats and rosy-cheeked gnomes, the scent of glögg (Swedish mulled wine) in the air, and friends gathered around a table alight with deliciously unusual treats: Saint Lucia saffron buns, truffles made of chocolate and oats, and something that was once particularly peculiar and now is particularly revered—drömmar. In the little signs Kamilla uses to name each festive platter of sweets, this one is described as being originally made with deer horn salt.

What? Yes, indeed. Though nowadays, bakers often substitute ammonium carbonate. I got a scoop of horn salt from another Swedish friend of mine, but you can find ammonium carbonate on Amazon, Walmart (on-line, my brick and mortar didn’t have it), and King Arthur Baking Company. It’s a precursor to baking soda, so used in old-timey baking recipes from northern Europe like speculoos, pfeffernerse, jam cookies, and these “dream cookies”. The ammonium stinks when you open the package, I’m not gonna lie (there’s a reason this was the primary ingredient in ye olde smelling salts), but once baked in a cookie, it adds this curious “what is that?” complexity. As a bonus, it leaves none of the soapy flavor residue of baking soda and creates baked goods particularly light and crisp.

International Christmas Cookies Collection

Kamilla sent me this recipe from recepten.se and I worked hard to translate it. Google Translate of course helped with the words, but I had to figure out if Swedish recipes assume salted or unsalted butter (salted, it turns out, unlike the US) and if the word for sugar translated to caster sugar or powdered sugar, as it could have been either. The recipe I give here answers these questions (and includes a hack for the caster sugar) and uses American measurement conversions, but the original includes photos of the steps in case that’s of interest. Note: This is a recipe where your kitchen scale is your friend. Trying to convert decliters to to cups is a challenge. Just weight it all, it’s easier anyway, and your flour amounts will be more correct than using a measuring cup, which leads to a better and more consistent final product.

Ingredients:

100 g salted butter, softened (or use unsalted and add a quarter teaspoon of salt)
2 dl caster sugar, or 170 grams. If you don’t have caster sugar, you can run regular granulated sugar in a food processor for a few seconds.
2 teaspoons vanilla sugar (I always have this because I keep a jar of sugar with my spent vanilla beans, but if you don’t have it, add a teaspoon of vanilla extract)
1 dl cooking oil, or 100 grams
1 teaspoon deer antler salt or ammonium carbonate
4 dl (240 g) all purpose flour

Instructions:

Measure out butter, powdered sugar and vanilla sugar in a bowl. Work into a smooth batter with an electric mixer.
Add cooking oil and deer antler salt/ammonium carbonate. Run with an electric mixer to a smooth batter.
Add the flour. Run with an electric mixer until .the batter consists of large crumbs and the batter gets stuck in the whisks. Press the batter together into a single lump. Note: Do not take a sneak peek of the dough! Until the ammonia bakes off, it will be, shall we say, not good.
Divide the dough into small pieces a bit smaller than a ping pong ball (one batch should be about 50 cookies). Place balls on sheets of parchment paper, separated from each other to leave room for spreading.
Bake in the middle of the oven at 150 ° C /300F for about 20 minutes. Let cool. Store the cookies in tins with lids or freeze them.

Alfajores

South America by way of the Middle East

This may be the truest wanderlust cookie on this list, thanks to its wandering history. I love how people bring their native flavors when they populate new places (it’s the reason the Lower East Side of Manhattan is my favorite New York City neighborhood and the LES Tenement Museum is my favorite museum—did you know that at the turn of the century, every block of the LES boasted several lager saloons? And the way the Germans saloon owners kept people drinking was by offering a heaving table of salty food? Fascinating.) In any case, alfajores were originally known as alajú, a kind of cookie rolled with dried fruit and nuts until they became gooey, made by people in Western North Africa. When the Moors traveled through Spain, they brought their cookies, and when Spaniards elbowed their way into South America, they kept the alfajores love going.

Each region and country put their own spin on the cookie, as regions and countries are wont to do. And so you’ll find sandwich cookies filled with all sorts of sticky takes on the original, including marmalade, chocolate, and these, filled with dulce de leche. In the 1950’s an Argentinian company mass produced alfajores with dulce de leche to sell to tourists, so this version became the most recognizable type of the cookie. Though the mass produced variety has nothing on this one.

global international christmas cookie collection

My recipe comes from The Spruce Eats, and recommends homemade dulce de leche. I admit, I found this prospect daunting, but with my book written and waiting for editing, I figured, why not? As it turns out, if you’ve got the time (and if you don’t, do just buy some!) it’s quite satisfying to make your own. You may have all the ingredients in your larder now (if you happen to stock evaporated milk and sweetened condensed milk, and I do), and watching the color change from creamy milk to dark and lusty caramel, well, that’s an alchemy worth repeating. Making it also cemented for me the difference between caramel and dulce de leche—caramel is made by simmering sugar and water until it turns color and then adding butter and cream. Dulce de leche comes from cooking down milk. So to my mind, caramel is caramelized sucrose and dulce de leche is caramelized lactose (though yes, there is some sucrose in there as well). Understanding that can help you identify the different flavor notes.

Ingredients:

1 3/4 cups cornstarch
120 grams (about 1 cup) all-purpose flour, more as needed
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup (8-ounces) room-temperature unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1/2 cup confectioners' sugar
1 to 2 tablespoons pisco, or brandy, more as needed (I used Cognac, since we always have plenty of that around since our trip to the region)
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 cup homemade or store-bought dulce de leche
1/2 cup sweetened shredded dried coconut (optional)

Instructions:

Combine cornstarch, flour, baking powder, and salt in the bowl of a stand mixer (the website indicates how to do this without a stand mixer if you need that).
Add butter and turn your mixer on low to combine and then speed it up until it’s well blended and light.
Add the powdered sugar, pisco, and vanilla. Mix on low speed until a smooth dough forms. Add another tablespoon or two of pisco if the dough is too crumbly to form a ball.
Shape the dough into a disk, wrap, and let the dough rest, refrigerated, for 30 minutes. Preheat oven to 350 F.
Lightly flour (you don’t want to get too much flour in the dough or it’ll be tough) a work surface. Roll out dough to 3/8" thickness, and cut into 2-inch circles. Combine and re-roll the scraps just once. Any more and you’ll wind up with tough cookies.
Place cookies on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or a silpat baking mat.
Bake cookies one sheet at a time until the edges begin to turn golden brown, rotating the tray halfway through for 15 to 17 minutes total. Let cookies cool 5 minutes, then transfer to rack to cool completely. If you accidentally cooked them to a shade darker than you intended (easy to do with these), remove them from the baking sheet right away so they don’t continue cooking.
Once cool, spread one cookie with dulce de leche. Since the cookies are fragile, you may opt for a piping bag, but I did just fine without that. Just make sure you get the dulce de leche all the way to the edge of the cookie so it can pick up the coconut.
Top with a second cookie to make a sandwich. Roll the perimeter in the coconut, sprinkling more over the edges if the coconut doesn't adhere easily. You can also leave this step out. I love the coconut, but Keith thought it didn’t add a lot. No wrong answers!
The cookies change as they sit, crisp on day one and then softening from the dulce de leche until they take on a more cakelike texture. So make sure you have them daily so you can experience all the stages!

What are you favorite wanderlust cookies? Let us know and feel free to include a link or the recipe! I’ll likely continue to add to this list as time goes on, so make sure you are signed up for the Grapevine so you get updates about cookies, travel, wanderlust reads, and more! As a bonus, you’ll get a free copy of my novella set in Italy, “Seasons of Secrets”.