It’s time to make cookies

We have officially entered baking season. It’s the time when you want your oven on, when you have to walk around an island of flour and sugar at the grocery store, when pressures of gift giving seem to muddle the senses.

You can find 56 terrific cookie recipes in our California Cookbook. All the cookies have been tested in The Times Test Kitchen. You can make any of them with confidence, place them in cellophane bags tied with a pretty string and call it a gift. (The cookies left behind in the privacy of your kitchen are no one’s business.)

Make easy cookies or make ones that might take a little more time. Some will be very familiar, but others, like these rosemary/thyme butter cookies will be unexpectedly delicious.

PHOTOS: Terrific cookies to share and to keep

A few will require you to pay close attention. These gingerbread macarons from pastry chef Sherry Yard would be a pretty amazing treat at a holiday party. (They would speak of you for months.)

The chocolate sparkle cookies have gained cult status around here. They are all about technique, but really, are very simple. Just follow the directions carefully and watch that your chocolate doesn’t scorch. And then, watch as your friends bite into them. They lean over expecting sable crumbs but soon find the joys of a truffled, utterly cream center. Boom!

We’ll continue with chocolate but add hazelnuts with these hazelnut-chocolate Linzer cookies. Roll them out and cut them out with a scalloped cutter or a plain circle. When it comes time to fill them, use both purchased Nutella and raspberry jam and suddenly, from the effort of one cookie, you’ve made two distinct versions.

PHOTOS: Terrific cookies to share and to keep

These lemony moons and stars are as pretty as their name and they come to us from reader Carol Eblen who entered the recipe in our annual cookie contest. They’re thicker than most sugar cookies and have a glaze you can sink your teeth into.

Or go the bar route. The recipe for Millionaire’s Shortbread bars comes from the Coach House, a cafe in the Scottish village of Luss. It’s a layer of shortbread topped with caramel and then chocolate.

Finally, the season brings with it a craving for molasses. A reader requested Milk’s molasses cookies recipe saying they were the best molasses cookie she’s had. They’re made with cinnamon, ginger and cloves and if that combination doesn’t evoke winter baking, nothing does.

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