3 Holiday Cookie Recipes Inspired by Weekends with Yankee

In Season 6 of Weekends with Yankee, we explored New Hampshire’s Inn-to-Inn Cookie Tour, an annual weekend festival that returns on December 12 and 13, 2026. Traveling from one snowy White Mountains village to the next, we sampled the innkeepers’ signature bakes and heard the sweet family stories behind the recipes. In that same season, we met Aissa Sweets owner Ahmad Aissa, who had fled civil war in his native Syria to begin a new life in Concord, New Hampshire, with his wife, Evelyn. A hobby baker, he discovered that making his mother’s cookie and pastry recipes not only connected him to his homeland but formed the foundation of a thriving business.

Beloved cookie recipes often carry people’s stories, and that’s certainly true in my case. My favorites have accumulated like layers in time: Aunt Madeline’s pecan puffs, a childhood love; the molasses clove cookies I learned to make in high school; the frosted sour cream cookies my friend Mindy shared when I was 25. I could stop with those and still bake happily for the rest of my life.

But there’s always room for something new. I developed the following three recipes with an eye to flavor, beauty, and variety. The chocolate-coconut buckwheat cookies, inspired by a favorite recipe from the cookbook Sister Pie by Lisa Ludwinski, have an intoxicating chocolate-nutty flavor and just happen to be gluten-free. The pinwheel cookies, inspired by Neapolitan ice cream, are eye-catchers, with layers of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry flavor. And the cranberry-lime bars have all the appeal of lemon bars—a buttery shortbread topped with a tart curd layer—but with the harmony of cranberry and lime flavors and festive colors. Comfort and joy, indeed.

This feature was originally published as “Full Plate” in the November/December 2026 issue of Yankee.

Neapolitan Pinwheel Cookies
Gluten-Free Chocolate-Coconut Buckwheat Cookies
Cranberry-Lime Bars

Amy Traverso

Amy Traverso is the senior food editor at Yankee and cohost of the public television series Weekends with Yankee, a coproduction with GBH. Previously, she was food editor at Boston magazine and an associate food editor at Sunset magazine. Her work has also been published in The Boston Globe, Saveur, and Travel & Leisure, and she has appeared on Hallmark Home & Family, The Martha Stewart Show, Throwdown with Bobby Flay, and Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Amy is the author of The Apple Lover’s Cookbook, which was a finalist for the Julia Child Award for best first-time author and won an IACP Cookbook Award in the “American” category.

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