Cookies: 5 new baking cookbooks elevate your holiday cookie exchange

I have been invited to my first holiday cookie exchange, and the anticipation is almost unbearable.

As a 45-year-old Jewish mom and basic home baker — it’s OK, I’m basic in that regard — I have always wanted to participate in what to me sounds like the most amazing and soul-warming winter tradition: I’ll bake many batches of some face-meltingly delicious cookie. You bring your grandmother’s famous oatmeal raisins, or maybe those chocolate-dipped biscotti your kids love. And we’ll trade with other friends while sipping eggnog and wearing ugly sweaters.

For ideas — I’m trying so hard, I may actually sabotage this thing — I pored over nearly a dozen baking cookbooks looking for the perfect recipe, and landed on several delightful options in the five new collections below. Whether you’re attending a cookie exchange this month or just baking a batch for yourself, I hope you find as much inspiration in these pages as I did. Happy holidays.

Advent

Love Lebkuchen? Obsessed with stollen? Food writer Anja Dunk’s new cloth-bound collection combines the very best of seasonal German bakes in one evocatively-photographed collection.

And, of course, no proper bunter teller would be complete without piles of festive cookies and biscuits. “Advent: Festive German Bakes to Celebrate the Coming of Christmas” (Quadrille, $35), features them all, from simple, icing-topped Cinnamon Stars to Doppeldecker, delectable jam-filled double deckers.

The cookbook features Dunk’s own linocut illustrations and is written in her signature old-friend voice, with sweet stories about growing up in Germany with that almost unbearable anticipation of Christmas.

Lazy Baking

If baking to you is quick breads and one-bowl brownies, then make room on your shelf for Jessica Elliott Dennison’s latest collection. Just saying the name — “Lazy Baking: Really Easy Sweet and Savoury Bakes” — keeps baker’s anxiety at bay.

No pesky pie crusts or precious apple roses here. The book (Hardie Grant, $25) offers time-saving tricks and relies on basic equipment — just a whisk — to make Thumbprint Cookies, Sugar Buns For Tea and other baked goods straight from Dennison’s kitchen at Elliott’s, the seasonally-driven bistro she runs in Edinburgh. And most call for minimal ingredients.

Dennison’s One-Jar Peanut Butter Cookies are made with four ingredients. Her famous Elliott’s Sea Salt Chocolate Cookies, “the perfect cookie, with a crisp edge, squidgy centre and enough flaky sea salt to balance the sugar and chocolate,” come together in 20 minutes.

Cookies: The New Classics

Tired of oatmeal, peanut butter and chocolate chip? Reset the cookie button  with this collection of 100 unapologetically modern treats from Jesse Szewczyk, cookie columnist for The Kitchn.

You can’t have that job title and not be an expert in all things cookie, including — wait for it — how to make the perfect boozy biscuit, aka Red Wine Brownie Cookies. But that doesn’t mean the recipes in “Cookies: The New Classics” (Clarkson Potter, $27.50) are fussy or time-consuming. Szewczyk developed them to be straightforward, with no-bake options and most recipes not even requiring a mixer.

With chapters organized by dominant flavor to suit your mood, from Nutty (Matcha Amaretti Cookies) and Smoky (Maple and Peppered-Bacon Cookies) to Chocolatey (Maple and Cinnamon Chocolate Moon Pies with Maple Marshmallow Crème), the book is perfect for the adventurous baker looking to redefine their favorite go-to cookies. Mmm, Peanut Butter Caramel Millionaire’s Shortbread.

King Arthur Baking Company

When one of the most trusted sources in American baking releases a new cookie collection, you grab it. Newly revised and updated, “King Arthur Baking Company: The Essential Cookie Companion” (Countryman Press, $35) features more than 400 recipes for bakers of all levels.

It’s all in here: Chocolate chip cookies (chewy or crispy), graham crackers, butter pecans, macaroons, blondies, whoopie pies, wedding cookies and every flavor of sugar cookie. We particularly appreciate the sidebars full of hints and troubleshooting advice, as well as substitutions and variations using gluten-free flours. There’s even advice on high-altitude baking.

Martha Stewart’s Fruit Desserts

It’s not heavy on cookies, but the Doyenne of Everything’s latest collection is so inspiring, it had to be included in a roundup of hot new baking books. Organized by season and dedicated to fruit farmers and orchard growers, the book (Clarkson Potter, $29), shares Stewart’s secrets for buying, storing and cooking fruit into 100-plus recipes, including classic pies and tarts, easy snacking cakes, modern ice pops and kulfis — and cookie-like cheesecake and crumble bars.

When you’re not drooling over the Strawberry Swirl Bundt Cake or committing Stewart’s golden rules to memory — know your oven and learn to trust your baking instincts are biggies for us — you’re awwing over Stewart’s childhood summers on the Jersey Shore, when her family went to farm stands for quarts of blueberries— to her, the best in the nation — or “pecks of white peaches” to make ice cream or tarts. Oh, Martha.