Avenue J in Midwood has a good amount of kosher bakeries, and this time of year, the week leading up to Purim, those bakeries are filled with mishloach manot gift baskets and hamentashen. Poppy and apricot are my personal favorite, so when available, that's what I ordered at each stop. I didn't find a bad hamentashen in the bunch, but there were a few standouts. Here are the goods, from acceptable to outstanding. More

Happily for cookie lovers in the five boroughs, the Girl Scouts of Greater New York have announced the launch of four Cookie Pop-Up Shops, conveniently located in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island. More

If you're like me, deep down, you know that Santa Claus is real without a shred of doubt in your heart. (It simply makes sense that an immortal yet overweight elderly man would have the back strength to slide down a chimney and deliver presents to all 7 billion of us in a single night.) If you're a naysayer, just know that you're rebuking one of your own—Kris Kringle is a food lover, and his voracious appetite for hours-long nocturnal cookie-and-milk binges proves it. Holiday season is cookie season, and in this city, night owls can take advantage of bakeries offering twilight confections. More

What can I say, I'm a sucker for mildly hard-to-pronounce German sweets (see pfeffernüsse and zimtsterne), especially when they come in a holiday tin. Lebkuchen can be added to the aforementioned list. But if you don't have a sweet German grandma baking them for you (sadly, I don't) then it can be pretty absent from your life. Thankfully the NYC-based Leckerlee is making these traditional German gingerbread sweets, which originated in the Bavarian town of Nuremberg way back in the Middle Ages. More

At Bakeri Brooklyn in Williamsburg, the house-baked cookies are enormous, deep brown saucers. They're crisp at the outermost edges, and soft, gently chewy all the way though. More

Tucked away from the hectic bustle of Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, La Nueva Bakery is well-lit and filled with the lilting sounds of a variety of Spanish accents, the kind of spot where you can order a cafe con leche and sit for hours without any pressure to leave. More

At LIC Market, just steps off the 7 train at the first stop in Queens, Oatmeal Cookies are gigantic round saucers. They're slightly crunchy along the edges, but other than that, chewy all the way though with chubby little raisins and toasted oats. More

"Subtly sweet...curiously salty," is the tagline for Salty Oat cookies by Kayak Cookies, and it describes the cookies perfectly in just four words. More

Oatmeal cookie fans should head to Joe the Art of Coffee, where the soft and chewy cookies are studded with just as many plump currants as there are oats. More

At Savory, the new delivery-only restaurant based in Hell's Kitchen, every order you make is accompanied by a little sweet something. It's a token of appreciation, a little thank you for the order. And it makes all the difference. More