How to Nail the Perfect Cookie with NYT Cooking’s Vaughn Vreeland

The Wirecutter Show

The New York Times

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4.2 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 3 December 2025

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s NYT Cooking’s cookie week! Vaughn Vreeland shares his best tips, tools, and tricks for better holiday baking, and answers some listener questions.

Transcript

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0:00.0	What's nice about baking is that at the end of the day, like, you still have a cookie.
0:09.8	Like, you know, like, not being afraid of making a mistake is going to, like, free you up so much mentally in the kitchen.
0:19.8	I'm Christine Cyr Clissette. I'm Cairo Blackwell. I'm Christine Cyraclissette.
0:21.5	I'm Kyra Blackwell.
0:22.7	I'm Rosie Garan, and you're listening to The Wirecutter Show.
0:36.9	Guys, today we're talking about cookies.
0:38.6	Oh my God.
0:39.3	Not just cookies, but the book cookies, which is the new book from Von Vreeland, who is part of the New York Times cooking team.
0:48.1	I'm really excited to talk to Vaughn.
0:49.6	He is charming.
0:51.1	He is skilled, and he has a ton of great recommendations for holiday baking. He is the host of
0:57.4	Bake Time, which is a video series for New York Times cooking. It's also the name of a newsletter
1:04.6	that he started. Yeah, they just came out with that in October. I subscribed. It's great. And he's got
1:09.9	like practical but also aspirational advice on how to make cookies. And he wrapped it all up in his new book, which came out in October. I'm so excited because it's all ramping up for cookie week at the New York Times cooking. It's a big part of the year. One of the things that we did that's fun in this episode is we asked to hear from our listeners.
1:28.4	So we're going to see if you can answer some questions about cookies.
1:31.5	Yeah. So we're going to take a quick break. And then when we're back, we'll be with Von Riland.
1:35.0	And hopefully we'll get everything you need to know about baking great cookies. Welcome back. Our guest today is The Cookie Man, Von Reland. Vonn is the host of the New York Times
2:05.6	Cooking YouTube series and newsletter called Baked Time, and he has a new book out, appropriately called
2:12.3	Cookies. The book is a love letter to cookie baking. It is full of recipes for every occasion, many of which Vaughan developed, plus with many contributions from his colleagues at Times cooking, including Eric Kim's Goji Chang Caramel cookies, Juanda Kamalafe's Spiced Chocolate Marble Shortbread, and Sola El-Waley's white chocolate macadamia nut cookies. Von, so happy to have you here. Welcome.
2:37.3	Hi. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited. So we are catching you actually mid-Cookie Week.
2:43.5	For those who are not familiar with Cookie Week, this is a New York Times cooking annual tradition
2:48.9	where they publish a bunch of really awesome holiday
	...

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