During Cookie Week, New York Times Cooking unveils seven new cookie recipes to sweeten the holiday season. This year’s roundup includes matcha-black sesame shortbreads, holiday rocky road and even boozy almond bites.
As we all know: You eat with your eyes. The cookies are filmed and photographed well before Cookie Week begins. The festive, crumbly-in-the-right-kind-of-way presentation takes time — plus a few dozen bakes, and the work of a few dozen people — to get just right. Times Insider followed the cookie crumbs back to the beginning of the process.
Warm, Fuzzy Feelings in June
Brainstorming for Cookie Week begins in June, when hopeful bakers from the Times Cooking team develop ideas and submit their recipes for consideration. The Cookie Week team taste tests the options and selects seven cookies that create a balanced gift box. The perfect mix includes four flavor profiles: Chocolaty, nutty, minty and “merry and bright.” This year, the team also wanted to harness nostalgic flavors that evoked a warm, fuzzy holiday feeling.
Vaughn Vreeland, a supervising video producer for Cooking, developed the recipe for this year’s rum-buttered almond cookies. He bakes all his cookies in the kitchen of his one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, and made roughly 180 of them in getting his recipe just right. (It’s hard, he said, but nothing compares to baking Thanksgiving pies in his cramped oven.) His cookie, coated with slivered almonds, was one of this year’s “nutty” ones.
How-to Bakes in Summer Heat
After the seven cookie recipes are selected, the video team for Cooking begins filming how-to videos, where each of the recipe developers walk viewers through the baking process for his or her cookie, in August. One video is released on the NYT Cooking YouTube channel each day during Cookie Week, so home bakers can follow along.
Cookie Week has been an annual tradition since 2020, and by now, Mr. Vreeland said, it’s a fairly “well-oiled machine.” (No kitchen fires to report.) The hardest part, he said, is finding a day in August that everyone is free for the video shoot.
But baking in August does have some challenges, Samantha Seneviratne, who developed the recipe for cheesecake-stuffed ginger cookies, said. “Developing things, especially with butter in the summer, is very different than baking in the winter with butter,” she said in an interview. “It was much harder to make these in the summer because the cheesecake filling softens faster,” she said. To compensate for temperature changes, she adjusts the time the filling needs to chill.
Ready for Their Close-Up
The how-to videos are filmed in August, but photographing the cookies for their digital presentation and a large print spread does not happen until early November. Ms. Seneviratne is also the food stylist for the photo shoot, so she’s responsible for preparing everyone’s cookies — and making sure they look delicious, but not intimidating to home bakers.
This year, she made two batches of each recipe except for Sue Li’s green and gray matcha-sesame cookies, which required four batches to get the “beautiful stripes” just right. Some, like Sohla El-Waylly’s holiday rocky road recipe, were made by Ms. Seneviratne a few days ahead of the shoot, since she knew the colors and the shape would hold. Others, like Melissa Clark’s red and white peppermint cookies, had to be baked day-of, so that the icing would still look shiny. For food styling purposes, she’s also after “optimal cracking,” or the right amount of cookie chasms, in selections like Eric Kim’s lemon-turmeric crinkle cookies.
There’s no manipulation or tricks, no hair spray to make the food appear glossy or mashed potatoes cosplaying as butter cream: Ms. Seneviratne just focuses on making the dish in its “most beautiful way.”
And nothing goes to waste. All of the cookies are either given to the production crew, donated or taken home.
Once the cookies are styled to imperfect perfection, they are ready to be photographed. This year, said Kim Gougenheim, a photo editor, the focus was on bright, clearly holiday-coded cookies. Chocolate, however, usually means brown. Take Claire Saffitz’s Yule log cookies, which, though satisfyingly swirled, are monochromatic.
Ms. Gougenheim knew she wanted a blue background, but needed to be careful on the shade of blue; with those red and white iced peppermint cookies, she didn’t want it to look like an American flag. She settled on teal.
The photo team left space between the cookies on set (above) that they knew the print design team would fill with text (below).
Sprinkled With Text and Wrapped in Paper
“You always face the unexpected on set,” said Mary Jane Callister, the deputy design director for print features. They went in wanting a vertical composition, and “ended up needing to recompose it as a much tighter horizontal image,” she said.
On set, the art director Wayne Kamidoi said, the team is asking hard-hitting questions: Are the crumbs obscuring the text? Are there too many loose almonds? “It shows that food photography and styling is technically difficult, and needs an incredible attention to precision,” Mr. Kamidoi said.
In Sunday’s newspaper, the cookies are gloriously presented in a special section. The opening pages, or “saloon doors,” as Mr. Kamidoi calls them, “swing open” to reveal a panoramic cookie photo that’s nearly four feet wide. Once the layout is set, Dave Braun and The Times’s imaging department ensure the photos look their best when printed on newsprint. The sections are then printed in College Point, Queens, and loaded onto trucks for delivery.
At the end of Cookie Week, home bakers are armed with the knowledge needed to make some seriously sweet gift boxes, to give to loved ones or to enjoy themselves.
Seeing Cookie Week recipes on a swap table or at holiday parties “means the world to me,” said Krysten Chambrot, an editor for Cooking who shepherded the project, “because I know the recipes are taking on a life of their own, bringing life to a party and giving people confidence in the kitchen.”
The post The Glorious, Behind-the-Scenes Mess That Is Cookie Week appeared first on New York Times.
