Christine Chiao

Banana split cookie at Milk Jar Cookies

A banana split is made with good intentions: three scoops of ice cream, usually chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla, rested on a fresh whole banana halved lengthwise and dressed with warmed chocolate syrup. As is frequently the case, nuts are optional.

Once removed from a freezer, ice cream tends to have a mind of its own, often melting at a rate more rapid -- no doubt encouraged by the residual heat of chocolate syrup -- than would allow most of us enjoying it at leisure. And around the fifth or sixth scoopful, a banana split usually becomes dessert soup.

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Ginger Cakettes

gingerbread cookies

Gingerbread cookies may be a traditionally English snack, but the spice was introduced to the West through Asia. Ruth and Ruby Olvido, who are ethnically Filipino, wanted to capitalize on that fact. The sisters are the founders of Ginger Cakettes, a start-up bakery that opened in January of 2012.

"We were sitting around and realized that ginger comes from China. So we thought of our ethnicity and brainstormed on what other flavors have Asian origins," Ruby, who takes care of the business side of things, says.

The concept is simple: gingerbread men with an Filipino twist. On their current menu: ube, red bean, macapuno (a Philippine variety of coconut that is soft and jelly-like) and green tea pandan.

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Facebook/Milk Jar Cookies

Cookies from Milk Jar Cookies

In spite of, or perhaps because of, all the cupcakes and whoopie pies, Courtney Cowan and husband Adam Tiller opened Milk Jar Cookies this past Tuesday. Their Mid-Wilshire cookie shop offers up to 14 flavors -- all Cowan's recipes -- at a time, such as cinnamon sugar and white chocolate raspberry.

A Tollhouse recipe for chocolate chip cookies got Cowan started on the track to developing her own recipes in her teens, and she's tweaked them over the years.

"I started to work on it once I was old enough to understand [that] there's a chemistry to baking. I remember the day we were out of baking soda. That was the day I learned about leavening agents," she says.

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Ryan Ritchie

Lenny & Larry's vegan cookie

Let's just get this right out of the way: Northridge-based Lenny & Larry's makes the best pre-packaged vegan cookie on the market.

That's a bold statement, but the numbers -- and taste buds -- don't lie. Last year, Inc. Magazine ranked the company at No. 1,314 on its list of fastest-growing private businesses in the country, which is pretty impressive for a 12-person operation from the Valley.

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Flickr/Family O'Abé

Girl Scout cookie

It's Girl Scout Cookie season again, and in offices across America, helpful parents will be hawking cookies to their co-workers. Come March, you'll see the girls themselves embedded in front of local shopping centers pitching their wares.

Those Thin Mints are as tasty as the girls are adorable. But before you fork over four bucks to the little darlings, be informed: it's not all as sweet as it seems. Sure, they don't have that whole officially sanctioned homophobia thing that the Boy Scouts do, but there are a few interesting facts to consider.

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Brian Legate/Flickr

Samoas

Today is National Girl Scout Cookie Day (it's also apparently National Kite Flying Day, which, given the expected thunderstorm, you may or may not want to celebrate). And if you haven't already ordered your Samoas from the co-worker who sent around his kid's cookie ordering form as if it were a routine piece of inter-office mail, you can easily get your cookie fix via the Girl Scout's Cookie Finder app, available on both iPhone and Android platforms. Because of course there's an app for this.

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Rachael Narins

Cookies for Santa from PS310

Cookies! Santa sent us on a mission to find the best Los Angeles has to offer, and much like his naughty and nice scroll, our list was long. More than 38 suggestions came rolling in, and that was for individual stores, not varieties. It was sugar-shocking. We instantly decided to leave macarons alone, since we figure those rainbow treats merit their own list; and then we went out and started sampling. Cookies are always in season.

What we found out is that the Westside is where the cookies are. As far as we traveled, the siren song of perfectly balanced sugar, butter and flour kept luring us towards the ocean. Each of the cookies listed below is locally made, fresh baked and available to order for all of your holiday cookie-gifting or snacking needs. If you feel like we deserve some of that love, well, you know where you can find us...

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Rojer via flickr

TJ's gingerbread house

Forget foreclosures and rent increases. The real estate market just got a lot sweeter, with new listings of holiday gingerbread houses. Once upon a time, back when Hansel and Gretel roamed the forest without GPS, people (and witches) made their own candy-coated condos. These days, most of us are too busy for those kind of D.I.Y. projects. But retailers are making it easy to carry on the tradition.

There are three ways to go, none of which require turning on the oven. You can buy a pre-fab kit, which has all the baked walls and fixings needed to construct a house. Or you can purchase an assembled but unadorned gingerbread house, and then decorate it however you see fit. Finally, you can just buy a turnkey house, where all you have to do is pay and display. All of these gingerbread houses are around the size of a large shoebox and they have one other thing in common -- while they're made of food ingredients, they're intended to be looked at, not eaten. "They don't taste very good," one salesperson warned us. Turn the page.

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jgarbee

Lebkuchen from Rockenwagner Bakery

Take a look at the calendar. It's time to do some major baking. Hanukkah beings Saturday; after next weekend, you'll be down to the Christmas shipping wire. And for those of us who simply use the season as a joyful excuse to eat more cookies, we'll be more than happy to take some of those Röckenwagner lebkuchen (LAYB-koo-kuhn; photo above) off your hands. Have Maida Heatter's Cookies book? You really should, it's a great book. And you can make your own version of the traditional German holiday spice cookies, as Heatter includes a recipe.

In the spirit of sharing, after the jump, get three of our favorite cookie recipes from baking books published in recent years. One is generously spiced, one is loaded with nuts, the third relies on classic chocolate inspiration. Holiday baking diversity at its finest.

Even better: They all come with a bonus for you, dutiful baker.

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Flickr/nerissa's ring

Pepperidge Farm cookies

Slate has a story today by Leon Neyfakh that aims to parse the true meaning and personality behind each and every Pepperidge Farm cookie. Driven by a need to understand his own love for the relatively boring Chessmen, Neyfakh sets out to eat every Pepperidge Farm cookie available.

It was then that I decided to sample every cookie in the Pepperidge Farm family and figure out what was what. I would try to understand what made each cookie special and seductive -- and what it might mean to be drawn to one of them more than another.

The story goes on to detail not only each cookie, but also the history and culture of Pepperidge Farm. (Fun fact: Most Pepperidge Farm cookies are eaten by moms ... but you already knew that because your mom totally bought Milanos and wouldn't let you eat them, just like everyone else's mom.) But within this lengthy and exhaustive story, Neyfakh fails to ask the one burning important question that has haunted Pepperidge Farm lovers for decades: What the hell happened to the Capri???

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