Home-baked biscuits make fantastic Christmas gifts, especially if you package them in festively decorated jars. And no family holiday is complete without a tin of everyone’s favourite biscuits. With a little more than a month until Christmas, now’s the perfect time to start compiling your to-bake list.
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With so many mouthwatering cookie recipes on our site, it was difficult to narrow it down to just 10. (Such a tough job, right?) But here you go – these are the cream of the cookie crop:
1. Baby-marrow & coconut cookies
Baby marrows in cookies? Trust us – they taste much better than they sound! ‘Healthy’ meets ‘yummy’ in these soft cookies made with good-for-you rolled oats and coconut oil.
2. Peanut-butter biscuits
Make this recipe a little healthier by using no-sugar-added peanut butter or macadamia butter, both of which are great sources of protein, and replace the sugar with xylitol or honey. Enjoy these biscuits with a glass of milk or a cup of tea or coffee and be transported to peanut-butter heaven.
3. Razzy-jammy thumbprints
These old-school favourites don’t need any festive trimmings – simply arrange them in a pretty tin lined with tissue or baking paper, pop the lid on and voila! Be sure to try the salted-caramel and nut-rolled variations too.
4. Coconut biscuits
When singer-songwriter Amy Jones was little, she’d always ask her granny to bake these coconut biscuits – their aroma and taste are filled with nostalgia. She shared the recipe with us when she was featured as one of our GH Celebrity Bake Stars.
5. Minty dark chocolate-chip cookies
Banting guru Tim Noakes shared this recipe in one of our GH Celebrity Bake Stars issues and trust us, they taste as good as they look! ‘This recipe by Jonno Proudfoot is one of our favourite recipes in our book Real Meal Revolution: Raising Superheroes,‘ says Noakes. ‘They get their sweetness from erythritol.’
6. Cranberry nut cookies
Celebrity chef and GH Bake Star Siba Mtongana shared this recipe with us. ‘These moreish cookies must be nice and crunchy, not soft,’ she says. ‘I serve them with ice cream and granadilla sauce.’
7. Chocolate oaties
These quick and easy oaty treats are sure to become a teatime favourite. Replace the milk chocolate with dark or white chocolate – the choice is yours!
8. Gingerbread wands
These batons are the crispy, sophisticated version of gingerbread men. (Follow the tip at the bottom of the recipe if you’d like to make gingerbread men instead.) And nothings says Christmas like the smell of cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger. Yum! Decorate them with edible sprinkles in festive colours.
9. Iced rings
These biscuits (not iced) can keep for up to two weeks when stored in an airtight container. Once iced, they are best eaten within two days. So keep that in mind if you’re planning to give them as Christmas gifts.
10. Lemony ricotta pillows
We drizzled icy-blue icing over this Italian family favourite. Edible stars (available at baking shops, but you can use silver sprinkles too) add an extra festive touch to these pillowy soft cookies.
