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Whether you churn out stacks of holiday cookies annually or you’re planning your first cookie swap, the right tools can make all the difference. If you have the proper equipment, you’ll be able to make crisp cut-outs, vibrant decorations, and beautifully uniform cookies that you’re excited to share. Plastic Net Fencing
From a nimble rolling pin to durable cookie cutters and bright food coloring, here are the cookie-related essentials we recommend to make holiday baking fun and stress-free.
In compiling this guide, we sought advice from renowned professional bakers and cookbook authors. Wirecutter senior editor Marguerite Preston, who wrote one of the first versions of this guide, is a former professional baker, which means she has spent many hours scooping cookies and many more hours piping decorations. Over that time, she developed a keen sense of what’s practical, what’s essential, and what just doesn’t work. She also tested dozens of tools specifically for this guide.
You likely already have many of the tools you’ll need to whip up excellent holiday cookies. But if you don’t, we have guides to all of them. The most essential baking tools are:
In addition to these core basics, we recommend some added extras to take your decorating game to the next level.
This tapered pin rolls dough more efficiently than handled pins. It works well for rolling both pies and cookies, and it’s one of the easiest to clean. Plus, it’s good-looking and sturdy enough to last a lifetime.
You can’t make cut-out cookies without a rolling pin. If you already own one that you like, don’t fret over getting a better one: The best rolling pin is the one you’re comfortable using. However, it may be time to upgrade if you have a pin (or a makeshift one like a wine bottle) that’s difficult to maneuver, if you end up with sticking or cracking dough, or if your handled pin spins in place instead of rolling smoothly across the surface.
Our favorite rolling pin is the timeless maple Whetstone Woodenware French Rolling Pin. Its long, tapered shape pivots easily, so it’s ideal for rolling perfect pie-crust rounds and more-oblong cookie shapes. And this pin’s hard maple surface has a smoother finish than most basic pins, so it keeps dough from sticking and makes the pin easy to clean.
Though the Whetstone pin is a steal compared with similar hand-turned models, if you’re an occasional baker looking for something less expensive (or if the Whetstone is sold out), consider the JK Adams 19-Inch Wooden Rolling Dowel. One 10-year-old tester found this pin easy to use, too. However, since it doesn’t have tapered ends, the JK Adams pin isn’t as agile as the Whetstone pin, so it’s slightly awkward for rolling out round shapes. And because the surface of the pin was not as smooth as that of our main pick, in our tests it required more dustings of flour and more effort to clean.
This bench scraper has a comfortable, grippy handle, and the measurements engraved into the blade won’t fade.
You’ll find a bench scraper in every professional kitchen. They’re good for everything from trimming rolled-out dough to scooping up chopped nuts to cutting butter into flour for pie crust—and even just for scraping a surface clean. When you’re baking cookies, a bench scraper can come in handy for all of the above tasks, plus it’s perfect for picking up cut-out cookies and transferring them to a baking sheet.
For most uses, we recommend the OXO Good Grips Stainless Steel Multi-Purpose Scraper & Chopper, which has a comfortable handle with a nice grip. It also has useful measurements engraved onto the blade, where other bench scrapers have printed measurements that can fade over time (or no measurements at all). You might find a sharper blade on pricier models, but we think a bench scraper is not a tool you should spend a lot of money on. The OXO scraper strikes the right balance between value and utility.
These cutters had the sturdiest construction and cut the cleanest shapes of all the cutters we tested.
These sturdy and cute cutters give you a great snowflake every time.
May be out of stock
May be out of stock
For baking with children, simpler is better, and these plastic cutters are a little safer and easier to handle.
When it comes to cookie cutters, we’ve found that it’s easier (and more cost-efficient) to buy sets, rather than sorting through a dizzying variety of individual cutters, especially if you’re shopping for your first ones. For holiday baking, we like Ateco’s range of stainless steel cookie cutters, either the Ateco Stainless Steel Christmas Cookie Cutters or the Ateco 5-Piece Stainless Steel Snowflake Cutter Set. The shapes are clear and elegant. And of all the cutters we tested, the Ateco pieces offered the sturdiest construction and cut the cleanest cookies.
The Ateco cookie cutters had the heaviest-gauge metal of any cookie cutters we tested, and the difference was immediately noticeable. Many other metal cookie cutters—like those from the R & M Holiday Season Classics 12-Piece Cookie Cutter Tub—are made of tin or tin-plated steel that’s easy to bend out of shape and is susceptible to rust. In our tests, the Ateco cutters, while not impossible to bend, were thicker and more resilient, better welded and harder to break, and rust-free after many uses.
The Ateco Christmas cutters are are an inch or two smaller than others we tested, measuring on average 2½ inches from end to end. If you want big cookies, go for the snowflakes set or the Ateco 10-Piece Stainless Steel Star Cutter set, which have cutters ranging from 1½ inches to 5 or 7½ inches, respectively.
For baking with children, we recommend the Wilton 101-Piece Cookie Cutter Set. It’s a great deal, and the huge variety—ranging from letters to animals to several holiday images—means it can handle just about any cookie-cutting project your child wants to do. They’re plastic, so they’re not as sharp as metal cutters for pushing into cold or frozen dough. But they have a wide upper lip, which makes them more comfortable to push down hard on (our young tester gave them a few hard smacks, which was probably excessive, but fun for her).
If you’re short on space, or if 101 cutters seems like overkill, we also like Wilton’s Holiday Grippy Cookie Cutters. This set of four plastic cutters felt sturdy, and we liked the silicone grip, which made them more comfortable to use. Aside from this Christmas-themed set, Wilton offers other cutters in the same style (sometimes called Comfort Grip), including an “everyday” set of four cutters.
This cookie scoop is the strongest and the most comfortable to hold. In our tests it released the dough more cleanly than any other.
A cookie scoop can be a game-changer if you’re used to portioning out drop cookies like chocolate chip or oatmeal by hand. A good scoop has a mechanism that sweeps the contents out of the spoon with a squeeze of the handle, turning out consistent, perfectly rounded domes of cookie dough (or cupcake batter or frosting) with ease.
We like sturdy, well-built scoops with V-shaped handles better than those with just a thumb lever, since V-shaped handles work for both left- and right-handers and are easier to squeeze. Of the five scoops we tested, the Norpro Grip-EZ 2-Tablespoon Stainless Scoop was the easiest to squeeze and the most comfortable to hold, and it released both hard, straight-from-the-fridge dough and sticky, room-temperature dough more cleanly than any other scoop.
The OXO Good Grips Medium Cookie Scoop is another good scoop if the Norpro isn’t available. The squeeze action is smooth and easy, the handles are comfortable, and the tool is sturdy and reliable. But when we scooped soft, sticky dough, the Norpro model released just a little more cleanly.
Both brands’ scoops come in multiple other sizes, too, so you can make giant cookies or tiny cookies if you prefer.
Oven-safe and designed to fit well in a half-sheet baking pan, this rack is sturdier than other cooling racks we’ve looked at. Its tight grid pattern doesn’t let cookies bend or fall through.
A cooling rack will help your cookies cool quickly and efficiently, and it can come in handy while you’re decorating. The 12-by-17-inch Sur La Table Stainless Steel Cooling Grid is the best we’ve tested.
It fits well in a half-sheet baking pan, a nice arrangement when you’re drizzling cookies with glaze or dipping them in chocolate: Any excess icing will drip off into the pan, without pooling around the base of the cookies.
The Sur La Table rack is sturdier than most other racks we’ve tested, and its tight grid pattern (as opposed to parallel wires) doesn’t let cookies bend or fall through. Since it’s so durable, the rack doesn’t buckle in the middle when holding cake layers, either. It’s also one of the few racks we’ve found that's oven safe up to 450 °F and dishwasher safe.
These strainers are not as heavy-duty as the All-Clad models, but they cost much less. This is a great set for the occasional baker.
Heavy-duty and stainless steel, this set of durable fine-mesh strainers will stand the test of time.
You can use a simple fine mesh strainer to sift your flour, remove lumps from cocoa, combine dry ingredients, or dust cookies with powdered sugar, cocoa, or luster dust.
The stainless steel Cuisinart Mesh Strainers are dishwasher safe, and the multiple sizes in the set provide utility beyond baking alone: you can also use them to drain pasta, or rinse fruit.
If you use your strainers often and want to upgrade to a durable, premium set of strainers, consider the All-Clad 3 Piece Stainless Steel Strainer Set. These strainers have a finer mesh than the Cuisinart strainers, and a more durable, difficult to bend construction that has earned them a place in high volume professional bakeries.
Avoid old-fashioned, crank-operated flour sifters. These hold less flour than a large strainer, can only be used for flour, and are difficult to clean.
An offset spatula is a good multitasker for everything from cookie and cake decorating to simply lifting things off a cookie sheet.
For decorating cookies, a small offset spatula can be convenient, and it doesn’t cost much. Its shape makes it much more adept than a butter knife at spreading frosting or chocolate evenly over a cookie. But it’s also a good multitasker, and it does a great job of getting things off a cookie sheet. When you’re not baking cookies, you can use the spatula to slather your sandwiches with mustard and mayonnaise. We recommend the mini Ateco Offset Spatula, which is the easiest to maneuver of all those we’ve tested.
The Ateco pastry bags feature a high-quality plastic that’s slightly tacky, which helps keep the bag from slipping in your hands.
If you’re looking to get fancy with your cookie decorating (video), it’s time to graduate from Ziploc bags. Piping bags and a set of tips (and a little practice, of course) will allow you to draw smooth, precise lines with royal frosting or chocolate. For holiday cookie decorating, disposable plastic piping bags are the way to go because they make for easy cleanup and you’ll be able to use many different colors of frosting at once. Of the bags that sell in smaller quantities for home bakers, we like the 10-pack of Ateco’s Soft Disposable Decorating Bags (18-Inch).
You won’t find all that many types of disposable pastry bags, but they do vary in quality, and for the home baker the Ateco bags are the best option. Cookie-decorating expert Gail Dosik told us the Ateco bags are her favorite because they’re “very pliable” as opposed to the more crinkly bags from Wilton or Cake Boss. Also notable: The outside of the Ateco bags is slightly tacky—not sticky, but grippy, similar to Glad Press’n Seal plastic wrap. This feature offers an advantage, especially when you’re working with greasy buttercream, because it helps keep the bag from slipping in your hands, which can turn decorating into a frustrating and messy struggle.
Should you decide to take the plunge, Ateco also sells a 100-pack of pastry bags that's definitely a better deal.
One hundred bags is a lot, but with some pastry tips, the bags can help pretty up things besides cookies, such as the filling for deviled eggs, the mashed potato topping on a shepherd’s pie, or even cheese on crackers for hors d’oeuvres. We can’t recommend the enormous box for everyone, but if you’re creative and fond of spending time in the kitchen, you might just find a lot of uses for a large supply of pastry bags.
This set features durable tips with no visible seams. It offers all the variety you need for most basic (and some advanced) decorating tasks.
You can simply cut the tip off a disposable pastry bag to pipe a line of whatever width you desire, but if you want to pipe anything besides a straight line—or even if you just want to pipe a rounder, cleaner line—you should get a basic set of piping tips. If you’re using a thick frosting like buttercream, these pieces allow you to make stars, rosettes, leaves, and basket weaves, too.
After speaking to our experts and trying three sets of piping tips, we found a clear winner: the Ateco 14-Piece Cake Decorating Set.With 12 tips, a plastic coupler and a 12 inch reusable piping bag, this set offers all the variety you need for most basic (and some advanced) decorating tasks. The plastic coupler, once inserted into the bag, allows you to screw on piping tips from the outside so that you can swap them easily without needing to dump out the icing. The seamless tips ensure the icing is smooth, and the tips themselves are less likely to rust.
The Ateco tips also felt sturdy and difficult to bend in our tests, and we liked that the set came in a hard plastic box for storage, because without somewhere safe to keep them, piping tips are likely to roll away or get lost very quickly.
More concentrated than liquid coloring, this gel coloring lasts longer and produces truer, more vibrant hues.
Food coloring can make cookie decorating more fun (especially for kids) and more elaborate, but you can find much better options than the watery liquid McCormick sets available in most grocery stores.
AmeriColor Student Soft Gel Paste Food Color is the best we've found, with a wide range of color options and a concentrated formula. It lasts longer, produces more vibrant hues, and doesn't run the risk of throwing off your recipes with excess liquid. In our tests, its colors were the truest of all we tried, and the gel comes in squeeze bottles that make it much easier to use than the concentrated gels that come in little jars and need to be scooped out with a toothpick.
If you have concerns about using artificial colorings, one good set of all-natural food colorings, the India Tree Nature’s Colors Decorating Set, is widely available. The set includes only three colors—red, blue, and yellow, produced from beet, red cabbage, and turmeric, respectively—but they’re surprisingly true and vibrant. There are some downsides: the set is pricey, the colors need to be shaken before use, and, lacking preservatives, the colors lose their effect over time. You may not get wild, electric colors out of this set, but if you’re devoted to keeping things natural, this set of colors is a great way to go.
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Thick Plastic Netting Wirecutter is the product recommendation service from The New York Times. Our journalists combine independent research with (occasionally) over-the-top testing so you can make quick and confident buying decisions. Whether it’s finding great products or discovering helpful advice, we’ll help you get it right (the first time).