Popcorn Bucket Cookies | Vaughn Vreeland | Cookie Week | NYT Cooking

What's the last movie that I saw? I saw The Conjuring, which is not a holiday movie. I saw that and then, like, Weapons, and, like, neither of those are really good holiday movies. Hello, everybody. I'm Vaughn, and I can't believe I'm saying this, but welcome to Cookie Week 2025. This is the sixth Cookie Week. I'm so excited. Cookie Week is honestly, as you all know, the best week of the entire year. I feel like there's so much anticipation behind Cookie Week, and this year especially, because we have so many amazing cookies in the lineup, I will be making a popcorn bucket cookie. It is basically every single one of your favorite movie theater candies jam-packed into a cookie, brushed with butter, rolled in freshly popped popcorn, and then topped with a little bit of flaky salt at the end to really reinforce that sweet and salty vibe that you get when you grab a handful of popcorn at the movies, and then you shove candy in your mouth. I had the best time developing this cookie, and I ate so much candy. My dentist is freaking out. One thing I didn't want to compromise on with this year's cookie was making it easy, because I love, love, love a project, but there is something about just a very humble cookie that comes together super easily. To me, the fun part of this is playing with all the candy. So dry ingredients, set those aside. So I've got some softened room temperature butter. If a recipe calls for softened butter, it usually should be like body temperature. Room temperature is 70 degrees, so feel cold to the touch still, and that's just because I want this to come together faster, really. I've got some dark brown sugar here, and this is a cookie that actually uses more brown sugar than granulated sugar, because I really needed a cookie that was like gonna be hefty to hold up to all that candy. So I'm just gonna cream together the butter and sugar for about two minutes until I start to see its lightening color. What should we talk about for the next minute? Other favorite movies to watch during the holidays? Carol. Carol, yes! Oh my god. Honestly, give me a lesbian period piece any day. Die Hard is a Christmas movie. Oh yeah. Die Hard is a fantastic Christmas movie. You know what the best Christmas movie is? The Family Stone. I should bill the producers for my like 10 plus years of therapy from that movie. So the butter has like lightened in color. You can see it looks nice and creamy in here. I'm gonna use one egg and one yolk in this recipe. I'm gonna mix this until it's nice and homogeneous, like a frosting consistency. What's that other happiest season? You know, I actually do watch San Junipero at Christmastime too. Bring in the candy! I'm so excited. I'm just gonna go ahead and like get the rest of the dough done. I just like to cover this for a second. And then once I start to hear a little bit of resistance, this thing needs to be retightened. I feel bad for the old girl. Great. So yeah, you can see that I have some like pockets of flour still and that's because I'm going to finish incorporating the candy with the mixer. So let's talk candy. I love toffee bits. My dad's favorite candy is Heath Bar, so I've grown up loving Heath Bar. First what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna chop up some of the Heath Bar. I really like when they're a little finer. They just almost like dissolve into the cookie. I'm just gonna run my knife. Oh, that's so satisfying. I'm not a big ASMR guy, but like, oh. So we've got our toffee bits in there. What kind of candy do we want in this cookie? In go some Reese's. Oh, that was nice too. Maybe I am an ASMR person. Kit Kat! Ooh, yeah. Kit Kat I'm gonna leave a bit more bite-sized. This is kind of like making like a like one eye of newt. Like some rego M&Ms just for like color. Raisinets for sure. Okay. The chew and the tart raisiny flavor is really lovely. And the dark chocolate. One Butterfinger. Okay. One Butterfinger. This is almost like three cups of candy, but whatever. I just got like, sometimes I get carried away, you know? I mean, you could honestly fold this by hand. I'd probably call for that in the recipe, but at home, this is what I do. Put those instructions in the recipe so that folks don't overmix. But I know the point at which it would be overmixed. Oh. Oh. Oh, that's so satisfying. Shirley, get over here. Oh my God. I do think that they benefit from chilling for an hour because there's so much other stuff in here. It's going to help the dough just like get a little bit more cohesive, hydrate a little bit better. Plus, because you roll these in popcorn, they do need to be a little bit harder. It makes it a lot easier and a little less messy if the dough's not as like sticky. Honestly, this is also like a fantastic cookie to make with kids. And from experience, baking with my niece and nephews, they're not going to measure anything, especially when there's candy involved. So this actually makes also a lot of cookies too. So if you don't want to bake all these off, you could freeze this and bake for probably another three-ish minutes, I would say, but definitely check them. There will be signs. They look so good. They're so colorful and they're ready to chill. Like, Von, we need a break. Chill for only like an hour, right? They can hang out in there longer if you need them to. I would say anything over like six hours, maybe just bake them off or transfer them to the freezer. So I've got just my butter here. I melted it in the microwave. You can do it on the stovetop, whatever you want. And freshly popped popcorn. This is not yet freshly popped. We're going to go do it. Pop this in the microwave. When the pops dwindle to one every two seconds is when you want to take it out. Okay, that was a slay. I'm just going through and I'm crushing all I've got anyway in here, and I'll just eat whatever I don't use. So you can see here, I've got a good mixture of both smaller pieces and the bigger bits. There's not really like a mess-free way of doing this. So now that the dough's had a chance to actually like chill out for a little bit in the fridge, it's harder, which will make it, I think, a little easier to impress the popcorn on here. And then really I kind of just like go in and like adhere the popcorn to it. How fun. Let the music play. To, to, to, to the moon. These look fantastic. What I'm going to do while they bake is I'm going to prepare just a couple little extra nibbles to stick in the top when they're done. Fun. I'm going to bake these first for about like six, six and a half-ish minutes, and then I'm going to rotate the pans top and bottom, front to back, side to side. They look so good. Fun. Quickly, while they're so warm, do a couple things. Because gummy candy has the tendency to like melt in the oven, especially gummy bears. I love a gummy bear. I like to actually press them into the top. It's like a popcorn explosion happened. And it's like not messing up the integrity of this cookie to do this. You do kind of need to impress a little bit though. Like I wouldn't just sprinkle Nerds on top and expect them to like stay. Love. And then I'm just to like really drive home that sweet and salty. These look so cute. I'm literally obsessed with them. I genuinely had so much fun making this that I was like cookies should be fun. They should be as much fun to make as they are to eat. Oh, oh, it's a night of the movies. I love it. This cookie is so silly. Because of the toffee, that was a little finer actually in the cookie dough itself. It almost has this like butterscotchy quality. But then obviously you're getting like a rogue KitKat, an errant Butterfinger. Oh, is that a is that a jelly bean I taste? Yes, it is. Then you're getting popcorn, you're getting salt, you're getting butter, and best enjoyed with a bourbon. I really hope you make this cookie. And if you make these cookies, tag me obviously. But also tell me what movie you watch when you make them. Because I'm looking for suggestions always. Oh my gosh. Wait, whatever could it be? Okay, this tin is really, really cute. Ah! Oh my god. You prayed to the same god as me. These are so cute. All the same. They're so colorful. You want to find my cookie or any of the other cookies that my friends worked on this year? Go to NYT Cooking. So happy baking, happy cookie week, happy everything. Most importantly, happy movie watching. Okay, Claire's. Oh, oh fun. Oh, I'm definitely gonna try this one.