Our Favorite Fall Cookie Recipes

The recipe for these sweet and spicy cookies comes from the Warren family in Stanley, Kansas. The gingersnaps are a favorite at family gatherings.

Gingersnap Gems

Looking for a healthier cookie? Shredded apple, whole wheat flour, canola oil and wheat germ reduce saturated fat and add whole grains and flavor to peanut butter cookies.

Peanut Butter Apple Cookies

A Hanover, Kansas, reader sent the recipe for these chocolate cookies with peanut butter centers to a Midwest Living® cookie contest. A judge described them as "regally rich chocolate with a peanut butter kick."

Peanut Butter Munchies

Dried fruit and crunchy almonds bring antioxidants and omega-3s to these bars made from two kinds of rice cereal--regular and chocolate flavored--in our version of marshmallow-cereal bars.

Crisp Cherry-Almond Bars with Marshmallows

Packed with flavor from molasses, ginger, cinnamon and brown sugar, these cookies look especially nice when cut with a scalloped or round cutter and sprinkled with coarse sugar or crystallized ginger.

Fat Molasses Cookies

These cookies are almost like a miniature carrot cake. Top them with orange frosting and finely shredded orange peel for a cookie that's as beautiful as it is delicious. This recipe is from Nancee Allan of Centertown, Missouri, and "dates back to the 1940s at least," she says. "My mother, Helen Kaufmann, and our next-door neighbor, Georgia Mae Wenkle, used to bake a lot of desserts. This was one of our favorites."

Mother Knows Best Carrot Cookies

Stir together just 6 ingredients for this easy-to-make treat. Peanuts top a rich layer of butter, marshmallows, peanut butter-flavored pieces, sweetened condensed milk, and peanut butter.

Salted Peanut Squares

These sour cream cookies, decked with orange-butter frosting, come from a longtime Wright's Bake Shop recipe in Reed City, Michigan.

Halloween Cutouts

When Midwest Living® readers were asked to nominate their favorite hometown treats, we received hundreds of suggestions, including the cookies pictured at left. Clockwise, from front: Peanut Logs, a frosted bar from Linton, North Dakota; Swedish Dream Cookies, a pecan- and coconut-dotted cookie from Clay Center, Kansas; Amish-Style Sugar Cookies, a puffy sugar cookie from Ossian, Indiana; and Power House Cookies, a North Dakota cookie that packs together chocolate pieces, coconut, raisins, walnuts and oats.

Peanut Logs

Swedish Dream Cookies

Amish-Style Sugar Cookies

Power House Cookies

Chocolate, raisins, pecans, almonds, brown sugar—this recipe has it all, in an easy drop cookie. They are a dream to eat as well as to make.

Dream Jumbles

Wheat flour, flaxseed, applesauce and dried fruit add good-for-you ingredients to the traditional chocolate chip cookie.

Healthy Chocolate Chippers