The top 5: Our favorite holiday cookies for 2016

For the last several days, the aroma of freshly baked cookies has been wafting out of the Test Kitchen into the newsroom. It’s cookie time again at the Food section. This year, over 100 entries were submitted in our sixth Los Angeles Times Holiday Cookie Bake-Off, and almost 20,000 votes were cast by readers. We took the 20 cookies that received the most votes and the Food staff judged the entries to come up with our favorites.

The results are in. Here are the top five cookies from our 2016 Bake-Off:

• Holiday Kids — Suki Wada
• Rose, Cardamom and Pistachio Snowballs — Beth Corman Lee
• Salted Caramel Snickerdoodles — Fiona Marshall
• Linzer Cookies (Vegan) — Levy family
• Mexican Chocolate Christmas Cookies — Deborah Pappalau

Congratulations to our finalists, and a big thank you to everyone who shared your holiday cookies, memories and stories with us!

We’re inviting the readers who submitted the top five cookie recipes to downtown L.A. for a tour of the Test Kitchen and to be photographed in our studio. The recipes are scheduled to run in the Dec. 17 Food section.

Love baking as much as I do? Follow me @noellecarter

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