40 Best Cookies in the World

We didn’t plan to eat cookies around the world but it happened anyway. We blame hipster specialty coffee shops (which we love) that always seem to have stacks of chocolate chips cookies next to their fancy, airplane-sleek espresso machines. This is the case everywhere in the world except Antarctica. Antartica’s coffee shops would probably serve cookies too if there were coffee shops in Antarctica.

Our love for cookies starts with chocolate chip but doesn’t stop there. Eating all types of cookies is a guilty pleasure that rarely disappoints us whether we’re at home in Philadelphia or visiting a city like Copenhagen or Cape Town. It’s practically impossible to bake a cookie that we don’t love.

Brief History of the Cookie

Americans certainly didn’t invent the cookie. People have been eating cookies as far back as the 7th century in countries like Persia. But the concept didn’t stay in Persia for long. Thanks to conquerers and traders, the sweet, portable dessert made its way throughout Europe where it found happy homes in countries like England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. The rest of the world, including America, came later.

Discover 20 popular American cookies.

Cookies have evolved over the centuries with bakers creating recipes that fit their specific food cultures. Some cookies, like brownies, double as cakes. And they’re not all called cookies – names for the humble treat include galleta in Spain, biscottti in Italy, biscuit in the UK, sablé in France and bolacha in Portugal. The world of cookies is both big and small. It’s also sweet.

Our quest to eat the world’s best cookies may have been accidental but that doesn’t negate the process or its sweet rewards. We’ve now eaten cookies in dozens of cities all over the world and we’re not done yet.

Based on our on-the-road and in-the-mouth exploration, these are our current picks for the best cookies in the world:

1. Chocolate Chip Cookie

While the United States certainly didn’t invent the cookie, an American may have invented the chocolate chip cookie. Not long after the Great Depression, Massachusetts baker Ruth Graves Wakefield added chocolates chips to drop cookie dough made with plenty of brown sugar and butter. The historic result was the original “toll house” cookies and possibly the first chocolate chip cookies.

Today, chocolate chip cookies are enjoyed by kids of all ages everywhere including us. We’ve eaten the famous chocolate chip cookie at Levain Bakery in New York City that’s been copied all over France from Paris to Normandy. We’ve also eaten chocolate chip cookies in coffee shops in a myriad of global cities like Barcelona, Dublin and Lisbon. Our favorites are the Toll House chocolate chip cookies that we bake at home.

Discover more American food favorites.

Many people think of the Oreo when they think of sandwich cookies and, indeed, Mondelez International sells more than 40 billion of the cream-filled cookies each year. But Oreos aren’t the only sandwich cookies in the world worth eating. They’re also not the only sandwich cookie that made this list.

Sandwich cookies come in various shapes and sizes with a range of fillings besides sweet cream like fruity jam and salty peanut butter. Aussies take the concept one step further by eating Tim Tams which are both filled and coated with chocolate.

While people have been eating peanuts for centuries, two famous Americans get credit for the peanut butter cookie. First is cereal magnate John Harvey Kellogg who patented a method for mass producing peanut butter in 1895. And then there’s George Washington Carver who published the first peanut butter cookie recipe in his prolific How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing it for Human Consumption two decades later in 1916.

We’re not sure who came up with the fork technique used to create the crisscoss design that completes the protein-rich cookie. That unsung peanut butter cookie hero deserves credit too.

The snickerdoodle easily wins the award for the cookie with the most colorful moniker. But that name is confusing. This cookie has nothing to do with either American candy bars or cuddly doodle dogs. Likely inspired by German schneckennudel pastries, the buttery cookie is baked with plenty of cinnamon and sugar.

Fun Fact
The Kellanova company (formerly Kellogg’s) introduced the Snickerdoodle Pop Tart in 2022. Similar to the cookie, this Pop Tart flavor has has both cinnamon and sugar in its ingredient roster.

The sugar cookie may be the world’s most versatile cookie. While traditional sugar cookies are traditionally round, they can be baked in a variety of shapes and sizes. The best ones, deocrated with colorful icing, glaze and sprinkles, often have a holiday motif.

Although sugar cookies are baked around the world today, they were first baked by German immigrants in Nazareth, Pennsylvania during the 1700s. They were called Nazareth cookies back then. Just like today, those original sugar cookies were baked with butter, eggs, flour, vanilla and, of course, sugar.

Baked with wholesome oatmeal and dried grapes (i.e. raisins), the oatmeal raisin cookie sounds like it should be a healthier cookie option. It’s not. But that’s not the worst part about this classic drop cookie, at least not to us.

Oatmeal raisin cookies look so similar to chocolate chip cookies that it’s easy to confuse the two popular cookie flavors. If you’ve ever bitten into a chocolate chip cookie only to find out that it’s actually an oatmeal raisin cookie then you know what we mean.

While it’s documented that Austrians have been eating lattice-topped linzer tortes since the 17th century, details about the linzer cookie’s history are fuzzier. Similar their its pastry inspiration, jam-filled sandwich cookies have almond crust. They also have peek-a-boo holes that display fruit jam plus a dusting of powedered sugar on top.

America’s Pepperidge Farm sells a seasonal linzer cookie that’s decorated with a snowflake design. Britain’s version is called Jammie Dodger and Kiwis eat Shrewsbury biscuits down under.

Hobknob biscuits have been lining London supermarket shelves 1985. An immediate success when they debuted, the rolled-oat cookies reached cult status after McVitie’s added a chocolate-topped version two years later. Today, Hobknob flavors include milk chocolate, dark chocolate and chocolate chip. There’s also a gluten-free version of the original cookie.

Fun Fact
The BBC has determined that the Hobknob is the ideal cookie to dunk into hot tea.

Not to be confused with mushy coconut Macaroons commonly eaten during Passover seders in America, French macarons are fancified sandwich cookies made from a meringue of egg whites, sugar and almond flour. Some bakers add vivid food coloring to create virtual macaron rainbows. Others keep things more natural and create crunchy, creamy sandwiches that are muted, natural and still beautiful.

Ironically, the French likely didn’t invent the macaron. That honor apparently goes to Renaissance bakers in Italy. However, it’s fair to recognize world-renowned Parisian bakeries like Ladurée and Pierre Hermé for perfecting the petite treat and turning it into a global phenomenon.

Biscotti, also called cantuccini in some parts of Italy, are oblong, twice-baked (thus the name) almond cookies similar to mandelbrot in Eastern Europe. Italy’s version was first baked in Tuscany centuries ago before spreading throughout the country and beyond.

Tuscan people dip cantuccini into Vin Santo, Tuscany’s slow fermented holy wine made with white grapes. We were first introduced to this Tuscan tradition during a cooking class in Florence. After our host advised us to dip each twice-baked biscuit twice, we didn’t want to eat them without sweet wine ever again.

Also twice baked and oblong, Reims’ most famous cookie isn’t famous for its baking process or shape. Instead, its fame emenates from the cookie’s rose color and a dunking techniqe that involves Reims’ greatest product – champagne.

Dating back to the 17th century when Biscuits Fossier first bake rose-colored biscuits, it’s tradition to dunk them into bubbly champagne. However, after buying a bag of pretty pink cookies at Boulangerie Pâtisserie Paintagruélique in central Reims, we chose to dunk ours into flat whites at a local coffee shop.

Discover more French sweet treats.

Despite their name, hungaro cookies aren’t from Hungary. They’re Portuguese. We don’t know why Portuguese bakers chose to name this tasty cookie after the faraway Eastern European country. However, we do know that the buttery, chocolate-coated cookie tastes best when its shaped into a sandwich and filled with apricot jam.

Discover more Portuguese sweet treats.

Since we don’t have a time machine, its our assumption that the original alfajores baked and eaten in Spain during the 8th century were wonderful. However, we’re confidnent that the alforjes baked in Argentina since the 16th century is great since we’ve actually eaten this version.

Argentina isn’t the only South American country that embraced the alfajor when the caramel sandwich cookie arrived in the New World. Argentine bakers prepare their alfajores by filling two cookies with a luscious layer of dulce de leche and dusting them with powdered sugar. Some are even coated with chocolate and coconut.

Red velvet cake is hard to miss due to its vibrant red hue. The same can be said for red velvet cookies which are also red. Both versions get their flavor from cocoa powder. As for the color, that’s typically enhanced by food coloroing or beet juice depending on the recipe.

Around for decades, red velvet baked goods reached peak popularity after NYC’s Magolia Bakery turned red velvet cupcakes into a trend. The flavor has since jumped the proverbial shark and now shows up in pancakes, lattes and even beer.

The black and white cookie isn’t a typical cookie for a couple key reasons. For starters, its base is soft and cakey as opposed to firm and crumbly. But the real differentiator is its two toppings – equal amounts of chocolate and vanilla fondant.

Eastern European immigrants baked the first black and white cookies on the Upper East Side more than a century ago. Big enough to share, the two-toned, upside down cookie remains popular at NYC bakeries and bagel shops to this day.

Depending on the region where it’s baked, an amaretti cookie can be either soft and chewy or hard and crispy. However, regardless of its origin, this cookie is a great meal ender especially when paired with an espresso or sweet liqueur.

The list of Italian regions that bake Amaretti cookies includes Emilia-Romagna, Lazio, Liguria, Lombardy, Piedmont and Tuscany. While in Rome, we tasted Lazio’s version – a fluffy, slightly chewy, lightly crunchy, almond-flavored half orb topped with a whole almond. Once we’ve tried them all, we’ll let you know which region bakes our favorite.

Discover more Italian sweet treats.

Traditional polvorones in Spain are crumbly round shortbread cookies. Spanish bakers add almonds and lard to this cookie’s recipe before covering their baked cookies with a heavy dusting of powdered sugar. Polvorones baked on the other side of the pond, in Mexico, are a different cookie.

Mexican bakeries called panaderías sell a variety of polverones. Some are globe-shaped while others are flat. Some are naturally beige while others are a pretty shade of pink. However, it’s hard to beat tri-colored polvoerones (also called banderas) that joyfully emulate the Mexican flag whether you’re in Puebla, Guadalahara or American cities like Tucson.

While cannibalism is a practice shunned by societies around the world, there’s no stigma for biting the head or other body part off of a gingerbread man. In fact, children of all ages have been doing this very thing for centuries as part of Christmas celebrations.

Some gingerbread men have faces and some do not. They’re all made with gingerbread or pain d’epice that’s baked with flavorful ingredients like cinnamon, clove, nutmeg and, of course, ginger.

Food for Thought – Where are the gingerbread women?

Europeans have been eating Neapolitan wafers layered with hazelnut cream since 1898 when Josef Manner started selling Manner Wafers in the shadow of Vienna‘s St. Stephens Cathedral. More than a century later, Manner Wafers are sold in countries around the world including the USA.

You can make an extra effort to buy Manner Wafers at specialty markets or you can buy Keebler’s Sugar Wafers at a local convenience store or supermarket instead. Keebler also sells Fudge Sticks which are essentially sugar wafers coated with chocolate.

While Florentines enjoy eating Cantuccini with Vin Santo (see above), Romans don’t mess around with their cookie recipes. Instead, they add wine along to pantry ingredients like flour, sugar and olive oil to bake little ‘wine donuts’ called Ciambelline al Vino.

Most Ciambelline al Vino recipes are flexible and incorporate either white or red wine. Eating them in Rome is also flexible. While locals often dip the round cookies into wine, we dipped ours into chocolate sauce while enjoying glasses of wine – a true wine win.

It doesn’t snow often in Spain but, when it does, the best snow is found on Nevaditos – dense cookies with a name that’s inspired by the Spanish word nieve i.e. snow. The best part of these cookies is the snow that’s actually powdered sugar.

This is the kind of cookie that abuelas, i.e. grandmothers, lovingly bake for family holiday celebrations. Since we’re not Spanish and don’t have abuelas, our nevaditos were baked by nuns in a humble convent located in central Madrid. They tasted great.

We’re not sure if Swedish bakers use their thumbs when they bake hallongrotta cookies but we assume that they do based on the cookie’s shape. We also assume that they always fill those cookies with raspberry jam since hallongrotta literally translates to raspberry cave but we’re not sure about that either.

What we are sure of is that thumbnail cookies, the American version of hallongrotta cookies, are indeed shaped with thumbnails. We’re also sure that popular thumbnail cookie fillings inlcude raspberry jam, nutella and Hershey’s kisses.

A stroopwafel is a Dutch sandwich cookie with two thin waffle wafers and sweet stroop, a caramel-like syrup, in the middle. Originally invented in Gouda but perfected in Amsterdam, stroopwafels are best eaten hot off the griddle.

Amsterdammers typically pair stroopwafels with hot coffee or tea. Not only is this the traditional way to eat the Dutch cookie, but it’s also the best way. When the drink’s steam hits the stroopwafel, the reaction is culinary magic.

Humans have been eating sesame seeds for millenia. The seeds are a popular vegetarian ingredient in Asian dishes like japchae and are also found in Middle Eastern dishes like hummus and, of course, on bagels. But sesame seed aren’t just a staple ingredient in savory food. Bakers add sesame seeds to cookie recipes too.

Different parts of the world are known for different sesame cookies. Sicilians bake biscotti reginelle in Palermo while Syrians bake barazik in Damascus. However, the sesame cookie we ate in Paris may be the most global version since it was baked in France by an American of Taiwanese descent.

If you’re wondering if a brownie is a cake or a cookie, the answer is both. It has fudgy, cake-like texture but its dough is dense and cookie-like. After much debate, we’ve chosen to categorize the brownie as a cookie for the purpose of this article. Our article, our rules.

However, there’s no debate that the brownie was invented in Chicago and first served at the Palmer House Hotel. This date is no mystery since the brownie’s invention coincided with the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.

Shortbread isn’t like other breads because it’s not actually a bread. Despite its misleading name, buttery, sweet shortbread, with a history linked to Mary Queen of Scots, is Scotland’s greatest contribution to the global cookie clatch.

Calling for sugar, butter and flour in a 1:2:3 ratio, the 16th century shortbread recipe is fairly simple. But, despite the recipe’s simplicity, the cookie itself is timeless.

While most French people wouldn’t consider eating sablé (i.e. sand) at a plage (i.e. beach), garçons (i.e. boys) and filles (i.e. girls) smile when muching on a sablé cookie. Unlike actual sand, the crumbly cookie tastes great thanks to the generous amount of egg yolk and plenty of sugar found in the sablé recipe.

Sablés were originally baked in Sablé-sur-Sarthe during the 17th century but they’ve since gone global. We’ve eaten the French butter cookie in cities like Toulouse as well as in America. The ‘sandy’ cookies are hard to miss when they’re decorated with a distictive criss-cross pattern. They’re also impossible to resist.

Breton bakers don’t just deserve credit for baking the first sablés. They’re also responsible for popularizing the use of sarrasin (i.e. buckwheat) flour in cookie recipes.

Buckwheat flour, also called blé noir, has long been a staple in savory crêpe recipes and in kasha. Now, top Parisian chefs like Cédric Grolet are baking with the nutty grain with great results. Their buckwheat cookies are as hearty as they are satisfying.

Dessert fans who travel to Venice could easily eat gelato every day and be happy but that would be as shame. The watery city has a slew of classic cafes and pastry shops that sell traditional cakes and cookies. The bussolà cookie is the most iconic of the lot.

Created on Burano, Venice’s most colorful island, bussola cookies were previously baked by local women for their husbands to take on fishing expeditions. Today, Venetian bakeries serve these simple cookies with coffee. Whether you dip or dunk is up to you.

While people down under pause to remember soldiers who served in the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) during World War I on April 25th each year, anzac bisucits are impossible to forget. The buttery yet earthy cookies are as popular today as they were when many of those remembered soldiers died at Gallipoli.

Baked with rolled oats, coconut and golden syrup, anzac cookies may seem strange to people from the northern hemisphere. However, Aussies and Kiwis agree that anzac biscuits are great whether they’re baked to a crisp or chewy in the center. Agreeing on which country invented the patriotic cookie is a different matter.

Despite its kitschy appearance and similarity to gingerbread, Germany’s lebkuchen is a traditional German treat that dates back to the 13th century when monks first baked the cookies. Baking is no longer a necessity as modern Germans can buy heart-shaped Lebkuchen at Christmas markets as well as at Oktoberfest and other festivals.

It’s probably better to buy lebkuchen at a German Christmas market or at a festival like Oktoberfest than to make the sweet treat at home. The lebkuchen recipe has an extensive laundry list of ingredients that includes eggs, flour, honey, sugar, nuts, candied orange and lemon peel as well as exotic spices like anise, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, ginger and mace. However, there is a difference. While homemade lebkuchen is soft in texture, the commercial version is harder and crunchier.

Discover more German sweet treats.

It’s practically impossible to not smile while eating a whoopie pie. The name itself is amusing. More important, the dessert delightfully connects two cake-like cookies with a layer of cream.

This American sandwich cookie was invented in either Pennsylvania’s Amish Country or Lewiston, Massachusetts. Both locations claim credit for the smile-inducing dessert. We once ate a ‘cookie pie’ while wandering through a London market. It was actually a whoopie pie with a British name.

Nabisco started selling animal crackers in America more than a century ago but they weren’t the first to bake crackers shaped like animals. York Pennsylvania’s D.F. Stauffer Biscuit Company beat them to the punch in 1871 after they got the idea from British bakers that created the animal cracker concept even earlier.

Our only question – why are they called crackers instead of cookies? After all, everybody knows that animal crackers are actually cookies.

We’re not sure why it took us five visits to Naples to discover Biscotto all’Amarena. Not only is the cookie a staple in most of the city’s bakeries, but its tasty filling features two of our favorite dessert ingredients – chocolate and amarena cherries. In retrospect, it’s probably because the nondescript pastry doesn’t provide a visual wow factor compared to other Neapolitan treats.

We’ve now eaten Biscotto all’Amarena at multiple Naples bakeries in our quest to make up for lost time. Ironically, we found our favorite rendition at a Salerno gelato shop. Go figure.

Popular in Madeira, Broas de Mel are crunchy honey cookies that remind us of ginger snaps. Flavored with spices like nutmeg and cinnamon, the Portuguese cookie is a holiday treats that tastes great at any time of the year. It tastes especially great when paired with Madeira wine.

Broa de Mel literally translates to honey bread. The confusing name was apparently inspired by the cookie’s shape as opposed to its flavor or texture.

Unlike sesame cookies that incorporate sesame seeds, tahini cookies contain ground sesame seed paste, i.e. tahini, in their recipes. The nutty, buttery paste is added to various cookie recipes but works especially well in chocolate chip cookie recipes.

Parisians started baking tahini cookies years before the crookie, a croissant stuffed with a chocolate chip cookie, became the new hot thing. But they weren’t the first. People in countries like Greece, Israel and Lebanon have been baking with tahini for centuries.

Christmas cookies are popular around the world for good reason. They’re fun to bake at home and swap with friends. They also make excellent hostess gifts and look festive when displayed at holiday parties and dinners.

Beloved American Christmas cookies include iced sugar cookies, decorated gingerbread men and chocolate-topped thumbprints. Other countries have their favorites too – waffle-like Pizzelles in Italy, shortbread Bredeles in France and spiral Spritzgebäck in Germany.

The only thing worse than getting a fortune cookie without a fortune is ending a Chinese food meal without a fortune cookie. Luckily, both scenarios rarely happen in America where fortune-filled fortune cookies are de rigeur at Chinese restaurants.

Ironically, fortune cookies weren’t invented in China but by Japanese immigrants in America. The crispy, sweet cookie provides a pleasant ending to a savory meal while the fortunes are fun to read – especially when followed by the words ‘in bed’. As a bonus, some fortunes include lucky numbers for those who play the lottery.

Frequently Asked Questions

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