Holiday cookies you can’t resist

Favorites from Reem’s and Manresa Bread

Convention dictates that the close of the Thanksgiving holiday marks the official start of the holiday season. In our house, it’s the beginning of a different but equally beloved time of year: cookie season. Its arrival is heralded by the purchase of an astonishing number of pounds of butter and the laying in of its bedfellows, sugar and flour.

For a decade or so, my wife and I have hosted an annual cookie party. It’s not a cookie swap, but more like a cocktail party, with cookies instead of pigs in a blanket. The party was borne out of our love for cookies, with a nod to practicality: There has never been space in any of our San Francisco flats for the Grande Bouffestyle holiday feast of my dreams.

Over the years, we’ve honed our assortment, which includes the late Maida Heatter’s recipe for Palm Beach Brownies, Gale Gand’s Hungarian Shortbread, the World Peace Cookies from Dorie Greenspan. But every year we audition new contenders because we know there is a world of delicious cookies out there and we have only scratched the surface.

This year, I sent out the clarion call to a few of my favorite bakers, asking for their favorite cookie recipe. I began with my aunt, requesting her recipe for hermits, which she has made since I was a child. Hers are slab cookies, gently spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg and clove, studded with walnuts and raisins, with a cakey texture. She does not typically glaze her hermits, but I added a thin layer of crackly sugar icing because, you know, it’s cookie season.

When I asked Reem Assil, chef and proprietress of Reem’s California, her Arab bakery in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood, if she had a favorite holiday cookie, she sent her recipe for Ma’amoul. The dough, made of semolina and allpurpose flours, clarified butter, orange blossom water, sugar and milk, is as tender as a Scottish shortbread. Concealed inside each parcel of dough is a sweet surprise — a date filling scented with cinnamon, cardamom, espresso and orange. Though ma’amoul are traditionally formed with a wooden mold, these are shaped by hand. Finished with a dusting of powdered sugar, they are elegant, understated cookies.

Avery Ruzicka’s Seven Treasure cookies are, on the other hand, what the British call moreish. The owner of Manresa Bread in Los Gatos, Los Altos and Campbell, Ruzicka uses a small amount of brown sugarrich cookie dough to hold a chest’s worth of loot: tart dried cherries, oats, cocoa nibs, coconut flakes and chopped chocolate. At once crispy, chewy, tart, nutty and sweet, they are extremely craveable, a cookie that any lover of classic chocolate chip cookies (all of us?) will adore.

You could serve these as a finale to any meal this month, or put them in tins and give them away. You could even wait until January to try these recipes. By then, the holidays will be over, but that’s OK, because cookie season is forever.