Sunday Special: ’Tis the Season for Cookies

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 7 December 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The first week of December at The New York Times is known as “Cookie Week.” Every day, for seven days, our cooking team highlights a new holiday cookie recipe. This year’s batch features flavors that aren’t necessarily traditional holiday ones — or even, for that matter, flavors. Instead, they draw inspiration from family night at the movies, drinks like Vietnamese Coffee, and perhaps most surprisingly, an Italian deli meat. In this edition of the Sunday Special, Gilbert Cruz talks with Melissa Clark and Vaughn Vreeland from New York Times Cooking about this year’s cookies, and they answer questions from readers about how to navigate cooking and baking during the holidays.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome, everyone, to the Sunday special.
0:05.6	I'm Gilbert Cruz.
0:09.1	The holidays are upon us, and that means so many people are doing a lot of cooking and baking and hosting parties, all of that fun stuff.
0:17.8	Here at the New York Times, it's Cookie Week.
0:20.5	We all love cookies. Cookies are
0:22.3	great. Cookies are wonderful. I personally can only eat gluten-free ones, which is probably why
0:28.6	I just never realized what a big deal cookie week was around here, or frankly, even what it was.
0:34.6	My guest today are two people who think a lot about cookies, of course,
0:39.1	but also about how they baking and cooking and entertaining. Because it's their job to do so,
0:45.6	Melissa Clark and Vaughn Vreeland. Melissa Clark has been writing about food for the times for almost
0:51.0	20 years. She has a weekly column. She writes one of our cooking newsletters.
0:56.4	And is it true? I read this in your bio. Have you written 45 cookbooks?
1:01.9	That is true. 45. Yeah, you know, cookbooks are a volume business.
1:07.0	Okay. Maybe we'll get it to that. I didn't know that was possible. Welcome, Melissa.
1:12.7	Thank you. So great to be here. And Vaughn Vreeland writes the Bake Time newsletter. He is also the editor of a new cookbook just out this fall titled simply Cookies.
1:23.9	Cookies. Vaughn, welcome. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.
1:28.3	I'm very excited for what we're going to do here.
1:30.3	We'll just talk about cookie week and also to eat some cookies.
1:35.3	So let's start with the basics.
1:38.3	Tell us about Cookie Week.
1:40.3	Cookie Week.
1:41.3	Okay.
	...

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