The Best Giftable Cakes, Cookies, and Desserts that Ship Nationwide

You can’t go wrong with a pie from Brooklyn-based pie specialists Four & Twenty Blackbirds. And Golbelly has three Four & Twenty classics available for nationwide shipping: The salted caramel apple, bittersweet chocolate pecan, and salty honey pie. For a large Thanksgiving gathering, I’d recommend opting for all three.

Chicago’s Justice of the Pies has won national recognition for its sweet and savory pies, as well as its community impact — founder Maya-Camille Broussard donates a portion of profits to social justice organizations.

For when you just don’t want commit, Peetee’s Pie Company let’s you order a pack of miniature pies (in sets of four to 12) in flavors like brown butter honey pecan and chocolate chess.

Milk Bar offers nationwide shipping on all its classics, but this time of year, Christina Tosi’s dessert juggernaut also sells a pumpkin coffee-cake cake. The vanilla cake is layered with cinnamon “goo,” cinnamon streusel, pumpkin cheesecake filling, and pumpkin frosting, then topped with coffee cake crumbles. The 6-inch cake will serve up to 12, or perhaps more if your Thanksgiving table has multiple desserts on offer.

A coconut cake isn’t particularly winter holiday coded, but any gathering can be a fitting occasion for Ina Garten’s version, available in a 6-inch or 8-inch size. You can add on her recent memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens, to the Goldbelly order if you’re sending it as a gift to an Ina fan.

For a show-stopping holiday dessert option, order a cake from New York City’s Lady Wong Patisserie, which blends Southeast Asian flavors with french pastry techniques. The ube blackberry entremet cake is sure to elicit oohs and aahs.

The longtime New Orleans bakery is making a special holiday version of its king cake delightfully shaped like a candy cane. Yes, it still contains a plastic baby.

For some, the holidays call for cheesecake. Mah Ze Dahr makes one of the best.

Should black and white cookies even be in a cookie category when they’re so like cake? Debatable. What’s less debatable is that William Greenberg Desserts makes the pinnacle of the form. The bakery even does a gluten-free version.

Italian rainbow cookies are time consuming to make but feel particularly festive, so simply order a box from New York City institution Veniero’s for yourself or anyone in need of some holiday cheer.

Ice cream may be low on your list of holiday dessert priorities, but it shouldn’t be. (After all, a la mode makes everything nicer.) Salt & straw is doing a bundle of Thanksgiving-themed flavors, including the crowd pleasing pumpkin spiced tiramisu and flavors that may inspire some benign dinner table debate, like turkey stuffing with cranberry sauce. 

St. Louis’s Clementine Creamery has two holiday ice cream bundles: A set of four Hanukkah-themed flavors, including black and white cookie, roasted pistachio m’hencha, madagascar vanilla, and gooey butter cake; and another four pack with peppermint candy, vegan sugar cooke, smokey Italian fig, and boozy coquito ice creams.

An ideal package for the holiday party host, this Breads Bakery combo pack comes with three chocolate babkas plus two dozen chocolate rugelach.

I, personally, would be thrilled to find baklava amid a Thanksgiving dessert spread. The baklava from Shatila Bakery in Dearborn, Michigan is one of the area’s iconic dishes. It reportedly triples its baklava production around the holidays, and thankfully sells some of that output via Goldbelly.

For when you cant decide between dessert or an after-dinner drink, there’s Solid Wiggles. The 5 percent ABV dessert combines orange, vodka, cranberry, Faccia Brutto Carciofo amaro, and lemon for its edible version of a cosmo cocktail, and it looks like a party, too.