Our Favorite Cookie Recipes From the Back of Food Packages
Nestle Toll House Cookies (Photo: Nestle/Verybestbaking.com)
Do you know where the recipes for your favorite Christmas cookies came from? They weren’t all from your grandma’s recipe box — chances are some of them were printed on the labels of your favorite pantry items.
You can find some of the best baking recipes on the back of a bag of chocolate chips, on a canister of oatmeal, or on a can of condensed milk. Who better to have the best cookie recipes than the companies who produce the goods that go in the recipes?
Classic cookie recipes — such as the Nestle Toll-House chocolate chip one that nearly every kid has baked at least once in his or her life — have been used by generations of home cooks and withstood the test of time. They’re delicious, for one. And the results are generally consistent and reliable, since they’ve been tested by professionals and home cooks to make sure they can be completed by bakers of every skill level.
We decided to look for the best cookie recipes from ‘the back of the package’ in this roundup below. Believe us, they taste just as good now as they did when we left these sweet treats out for Santa years ago.
Vanishing Oatmeal Raison Cookies (Photo: Quaker)
Quaker Oats Vanishing Oatmeal Raisin Cookies
Quaker’s Vanishing Oatmeal Raisin Cookies are not only delicious, they’re packed with healthy whole grain oats for a dose of fiber. The recipe has been found on the inside top lid of the brand’s oatmeal canisters for 20 years. While it’s relatively young compared to some other recipes, it’s found on a whopping 120 million canisters shipped annually by the company. The oatmeal cookies are Quaker’s most popular recipe — a third of all recipe searches on Quaker.com are for this classic cookie.
Magic Cookie Bars (Photo: J.M. Smucker)
Eagle Condensed Milk’s Magic Cookie Bars
Magic bars pack all the best elements of dessert in one bite — chocolate chips, creamy sugar, coconut, and nuts, all on top of a graham cracker crust. You can use a variety of toppings, but a great classic magic bar recipe can be found on the label of Eagle Brand Condensed Milk. The company has published the recipe since 1969, when it appeared in Eagle Brand’s cookbook “The Dessert Lovers’ Handbook,” which cost a wallet-friendly 10 cents at the time. Popular variations of the Magic Bar include mincemeat, butterscotch chips, or raisin toppings.
Coconut Macarons (Photo: Kraft)
Baker’s Macarons
This quick one-bowl recipe from Baker’s Coconut is the easiest cookie recipe ever. You need just six ingredients to make them, and these almond-y sweet coconut treats are baked up in a quick 10 minutes. A version of the recipe has been printed on Baker’s packages since 1938, and variations have been added since, including this three-ingredient version. For extra flair, you could melt some chocolate and drizzle it over the cookies, or dip half of the macarons in the chocolate for a chocolaty half-and-half version.
Nestle Toll House Cookies
No holiday passes by without someone you know baking a batch of Nestle Toll House chocolate chip cookies. The recipe has been found on the back of the company’s semi-sweet morsels for 76 years. As kitchens have evolved, so, too has the Toll House cookie: the standard recipe used in the late 1930s used to yield 100 small-sized cookies, Now a recipe yields a mere 60, as portion sizes have increased. As they say, bigger is better. Particularly when it come to Christmas cookies.
Love Christmas cookies? Check out these stories:
3-Ingredient Peanut Butter Cookies
13 New Christmas Cookie Recipes You Should Make this Year
Christmas Cookies: Everything You Need to Know About Thumbprints
Sugar Cookies Perfect for Swaps, Santa, and Snow Days
