Every holiday season, I bake lots of cookies with my mom and sister! If we're going on vacation or to visit family, we often pack the cookies and bring them with us as a little piece of home during the holidays! Our staple recipes are almond-flavored crescent cookies, lemon and cocoa pinwheel cookies, and the classic iced cutout sugar cookies. Every year, we take over the kitchen to make those three recipes and then enjoy eating them all season long.

Sana Khadilkar

But this year, I wanted to experiment with some new flavors- and my family agreed. This was the first winter holiday we were spending at home in about 4 years since we usually are on vacation during this time. With limits on where we could go and what we could do, we decided to have fun by experimenting in the kitchen. As we dreamt up new cookies, we thought - wouldn't it be nice to share these cookies, especially since we can't really meet for holiday parties? And so we bought festive cookie tins and decided to deliver our homemade confections to our friends.

Sana Khadilkar

Sana Khadilkar

We set out to make 5 types of cookies: candy cane hot chocolate cookies, orange spiced cookies, chocolate chip walnut cookies, and two of our traditional recipes: the pinwheels and sugar cookies. We baked for 2 days, making over 100 cookies in total. It was extremely fun churning out the different cookie doughs, rolling and shaping them, then baking them all.

After all the baking was done, we created little tags for the inside of each box and packed all the cookies in the tins. The best part about sharing the cookies was surprising every family when we delivered them and getting to see their reactions! It was special to interact with everyone and share a part of the holidays when we couldn't really meet in-person for our usual gatherings. This has been a crazy year, but it was nice to find some normalcy during the holidays with fun traditions like this one.