Make Show-Stopping Cookies This Holiday Season With These 13 Baking Tools

Whether tucked into a tin for neighbors, artfully arranged at a cookie swap, or left on a plate for Santa, cookies are a mainstay of the holiday season. Roll-and-cut classics like Gingerbread Cookies or Rolled Sugar Cookie Cutouts are delightful to decorate, and sandwich cookies like nutty Raspberry Linzer Cookies or gooey-sweet Alfajores Con Cajeta burst with flavor from their decadent fillings.

No matter if you make the same tried-and-true family recipes every holiday season or branch out into new territory, you need the best cookie baking gear to achieve the best results. Luckily, our team has spent hundreds of hours testing baking equipment to find the best tools to measure, mix, portion, bake, and decorate cookies with ease and precision. Consider an upgrade from your battered cookie sheets or struggling mixer and invest in a few handy items that will make your cookie baking marathons much more streamlined and enjoyable this holiday season. With these tools in your arsenal (many of which are quite affordable!), your cookies will be as fun and easy to make as they are to eat.

An Accurate Digital Scale

OXO 11-lb. Stainless Steel Food Scale With Pull-Out Display

$56 $50 at Amazon $56 at Williams Sonoma $13 at Walmart

Unsurprisingly, we are #teamkitchenscale here at Serious Eats. Especially when you’re baking, a kitchen scale will ensure the most accurate measurements of ingredients, with the added bonus of cutting way down on cleanup—you can weigh each ingredient right into the mixing bowl without the need to dirty a bunch of measuring cups. (However, if you do prefer measuring by volume, we recommend using one of our tested and approved measuring cups.) Streamline your holiday cookie baking and ensure consistent results every time with our winning scale by OXO. It features a pull-out display that makes it easy to read, even with extra-large mixing bowls on top, and its power-saving standby mode holds onto the most recent weight measurement for a full 15 minutes in case you have to step away.

Durable and Easy-to-Store Mixing Bowls

Vollrath 5 Piece Stainless Steel Mixing Bowl Set

$26 at Webstaurant Store

When you’re measuring out ingredients and mixing together cookie dough, you’ll need a set of roomy, durable mixing bowls. Metal bowls are lighter and easier to store than glass and are the preferred bowl material of most Serious Eats staffers. This no-frills set by Vollrath is favored by restaurant professionals (and by us in our review!) and has five wide, shallow bowls that allow for easy stirring, mixing, and pouring. They’re super low-cost and will last a lifetime.

A Feature-Packed Hand Mixer

Breville The Handy Mix Scraper

$130 at Amazon $130 at Williams Sonoma $130 at Target

Many cookie recipes start with creaming together butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Do so with ease using our winning hand mixer by Breville, which has rubber-coated beaters that scrape the sides of the bowl to mix cookie dough effectively, powerfully, and remarkably quietly. This mixer is comfortable to hold and has lots of helpful extras, like a digital display with a built-in timer, a pause button, a light that shines into the mixing bowl, and a snap-on case for storing the attachments and cord.

A Powerful Stand Mixer

KitchenAid 7 Quart Bowl Lift Stand Mixer

$600 $500 at Amazon $500 at Williams Sonoma $600 $500 at Sur La Table

If you bake cookies often or in large quantities, you may want to upgrade from a hand mixer to a stand mixer. Invest in the best with this stable and powerful model by KitchenAid. Its seven-quart capacity and well-designed attachments allow it to tackle large and small batches, and its silicone-lined paddle is perfect for scraping and mixing sticky cookie dough. If you only bake cookies during the holidays, consider our pick for casual bakers, the more affordable KitchenAid Artisan Series 5-Quart Tilt-Head Stand Mixer.

A Precise Portion Scoop

Winco No.24 Ice Cream Disher with Plastic Handle

$13 at Amazon

For portioning balls of cookie dough (or meatballs! or falafel!), no kitchen should be without a portion scoop. Also called dishers or cookie scoops, these scoops make portioning sticky dough faster, neater, and totally consistent from cookie to cookie. This red-handled #24 scoop from Winco doles out three tablespoons at a time, perfect for medium- to large-sized cookies, and the purple-handled #40 scoop is great for petite projects at 1.5 tablespoons per scoop.

A Well-Designed Rolling Pin

J.K. Adams Dowel Rolling Pin

$31 at Amazon $25 at Wayfair View on Breadtopia.com

If you’re rolling dough for cut-out cookies, you’ll need a perfectly even thickness. Thick and thin spots create cookies that will bake at different rates—and you’ll risk some of them burning on the baking sheet while others are underbaked. If you've struggled to achieve level, consistent slabs of dough in the past, try this dowel-style rolling pin. Simple in design but super effective, this pin rolled out the most even dough of the bunch in our testing of rolling pins. Prefer a French-style tapered pin? Mais oui! The J.K. Adams FRP-1 Maple French Rolling Pin also performed beautifully in our testing.

An Effective Nonstick Surface

King Arthur Parchment Paper Sheets

$25 at Amazon $18 at Walmart View on Kingarthurbaking.com

Lining your baking sheet with parchment paper not only provides a surface that even the sugariest cookie dough won’t stick to, but it also helps to prevent scorching and makes cleanup quick and easy. Save yourself the frustration of tearing off uneven strips of rolled-up parchment and upgrade to pre-cut, rectangular parchment paper sheets that are perfectly sized to fit a half-sheet baking pan. These heavy-duty silicone-coated sheets from King Arthur Baking Company can be reused a few times—good information if you’re concerned about waste.

A True Kitchen Workhorse of a Baking Sheet

Nordic Ware Naturals Baker's Half Sheet

$30 at Amazon $40 at Sur La Table $32 at Bloomingdales

This convenient two-pack of our winning baking sheet will keep you cranking out multiple batches of cookies. In our testing of baking sheets, cookies came out consistently golden brown and evenly baked using these durable pans, and their rolled rims were easy and comfortable to grip and hold onto. They’re quite reasonably priced, too. (Bonus: Add a snap-on lid and store your cookies right on the baking sheet!)

A Nonstick Baking Pan

Cuisinart Chef’s Classic Nonstick Baking Sheet

$20 at Amazon $20 at Target $20 at Sur La Table

If you want to skip using parchment paper but still have your cookies release cleanly from the pan, consider a nonstick baking sheet. In our tests, cookies baked on the Cuisinart pan came out evenly golden brown and slid off easily. The cookies did turn out a smidge darker than those baked on lighter colored pans, so check on the earlier side of the baking range to make sure they’re perfectly baked.

A Perfect Landing Zone

Mrs. Anderson's Baking Half Sheet Baking and Cooling Rack

$11 $9 at Amazon

Once your gorgeous cookies come out of the oven, they’ll need a place to land and cool off. In our testing of cooling racks, cookies chilled quickly on this rack without warping, and spatulas slid effortlessly over it without snagging. The lack of center support in its design also made the rack easier to clean, a big win in our books. It was the cheapest wire rack we tested—get a few if you’re making lots of cookies!

Petite Piping Bags for Precision Decorating

Cookie Cutter Kingdom Tipless Piping Bags

$12 at Amazon

To decorate cookies with icing, grab a set of these small piping bags. They’re called tipless bags because you don’t need a piping tip to use them. Many cookie decorators will simply snip off the very end and that gives enough precision to outline even the most complicated cookie shapes. If you do wish to use a tip with them, reach for a Wilton or Ateco detail round tip in size 2 or 3, perfect for piping borders of thick royal icing on cookies before flooding them with a thinner icing.

A Versatile Mini Offset Spatula

Ateco Offset Spatula with Stainless Steel Blade

$7 $6 at Amazon View on Kingarthurbaking.com

If you’re spreading frosting or ganache over the top of your cookies or a filling sandwiched in between them, a small offset spatula is much more effective than a butter knife. It’s also great for shimmying under rolled-out sugar cookie dough to transfer cutouts to a baking sheet or to lift delicate cookies off of the sheet after baking. This 4.5-inch mini offset spatula from Ateco is nimble, versatile, and inexpensive.

Professional-Level Food Coloring

AmeriColor Soft Gel Paste Color Student Kit

$33 at Amazon $33 at Walmart

For the most vibrant colors of frosting and icing, put down those bottles of liquid food coloring from the grocery store and invest in what the professionals use. Gel pastes are ultra-concentrated, so a few drops are all you need for vivid color, and this set by AmeriColor has a nice range of hues. 

FAQs 

What’s the difference between a cookie sheet and a baking sheet?

A flat, rimless cookie sheet has one very short, angled edge and is open on its other three sides. A rimmed baking sheet is a flat pan with one-inch edges on all sides, and is generally a standard size (for example, a half-sheet pan is 18 inches long and 13 inches wide). While a cookie sheet is fine to use for baking cookies, it’s limited in other applications. We recommend investing in a more versatile rimmed baking sheet instead, which can also roast vegetables, bake a sheet cake, or accommodate an entire dinner’s worth of food.

Is it better to bake cookies on parchment paper or a silicone baking mat?

We recommend baking cookies on parchment paper versus silicone. Silicone affects how heat is conducted to the dough, and its nonstick surface allows for more spread, causing the cookies to become dense and greasy with a hint of bitterness from excessive browning. Save your silicone baking mat for sticky projects like making nut brittles or syrupy granolas.

Can I freeze cookie dough?

Most cookie doughs freeze well if you want to break up your holiday cookie baking into stages or enjoy smaller batches of fresh-baked cookies on demand. Portion your cookies as directed onto wax or parchment paper, then fold them into packets and place them into zip-top bags. The cookie dough portions can be refrigerated for up to a week or frozen for three to six months. It’s a good idea to label the bags with the dough type, the date you made it, and the baking instructions so they’re easy to bake off quickly or give away for others to bake and enjoy.

Why We’re the Experts

• Afton Cyrus is a food blogger, recipe developer, culinary instructor, and freelance food writer and editor with a passion for baking. She spent eight years as a test cook and editor at America’s Test Kitchen before becoming a contributor to Serious Eats in 2023. Since then, she has reviewed hand mixers, liquid measuring cups, fondue pots, and pressure canners.
• Her recipes and food writing appear online for Serious Eats, King Arthur Baking Company, and other outlets, and in print in award-winning and New York Times-bestselling cookbooks for America’s Test Kitchen and Ten Speed Press.
• At Serious Eats, we regularly revisit our tested reviews to ensure our findings remain current.