The best cookies in Sydney

McVities are given a run for their money with this high-end, high-calorie digestive at Northern Beaches bakery Berkelo. It’s a rye and chocolate biscuit, stamped into squares so you can whittle away at it over a coffee. One half is dipped in just-set chocolate, and the biscuit itself is a crumbly, buttery, caramelly delight reminiscent of the base of a cheesecake.

These guys were an early adopter of the salty-sweet technique that's taken off in Sydney’s café scene. Their chocolate and sea-salt cookie is almost more chocolate than biscuit, and the crystals of pink salt on top ensure that no reward pathway is left dormant.

This stalwart of Sydney’s baking scene has been making chewy chcoclate and dark cherry cookies for well over a decade. They're as close to perfect as a cookie gets – rich enough that your paper bag will go see-through in transit, and they walk that  fine line in the chewy-crisp borderlands. Hitting a pocket of cherry is like striking flavour gold, pretty much black forest cake in shorthand.

A bakery is not a natural home for our gluten-free friends, but this Pyrmont house of bread also does a killer gluten-free chocolate cookie. The edges are crisp, and despite its room temperature, the heart of the cookie stays chewy and shot through with melty chocolate pieces as if it had just come out of the oven.

Some people equate veganism with "health food", and sometimes the two go hand-in-hand, but Shift's chocolate chip cookie keeps the good stuff front and centre, right where it deserves to be. You’d never know this crunchy golden disc was egg and dairy free, thanks to the crunchy texture, generous chocolate chip allotment and the glimmer of salt crystals on top to temper the sweetness.

The South American predilection for putting caramel on everything gave us the alfajore: two biscuit wheels sandwiched held together by dulce de leche. Any self-respecting South American joint has one on the counter, but we like to combine ours with a Chilean sandwich at this lauded, decades-old bakery and restaurant in Fairfield.

The sheer scale of options here for the biscuit lover is mind boggling, and you can get very carried away filling your box with classic biscotti, amaretti, jam-filled biccies and cannoli, but we can never go past the chocolate-covered shortbreads with glacé cherry hearts.

This newcomer to the bakery ranks makes an inclusive cookie that has a softness to it, almost reminiscent of a macaroon. The dark chocolate swipe and the citric sharpness of little candied cumquat pieces call to mind a regal jaffa cake. A small sprinkling of salt is also a good call. You’d never know it was gluten free.

Spoiler alert: it's not made on the premises, but it's as close to cake as a cookie gets. Reuben Hills stocks the cookie sandwiches from Butterbing, which are pretty much like a buttercream brownie sandwich. Choose from Nutella, salted caramel and even birthday cake, but for our money, the savoury peanut butter edition is the winning ticket.

This is a dense hockey puck that’s chewy and rich, but held back from the brink of too much by the judicious application of salt and cacao nibs, which remind you that chocolate also possesses acidity and bitterness. It pulls apart rather than snaps, but is still more cookie than brownie. 

You’ve had the Persian love cake, but for a sweetie on the side consider looking beyond the chocolate chip and go to the dark side with this black sesame cookie. It’s gluten free, so it has the chewy texture you’d expect from a macaron, but with more substance and no creamy filling. Instead the core is a dense tangle of coconut, giving the sesame flavour a tropical lift.

This American-style bakehouse right down near Central Station makes a chocolate chip cookie that’s as big as an adult handspan, chewy and crisp, that somehow doesn't crumble as you eat it. And, most importantly, it's generously spiked with chocolate.

Time Out’s top café for 2019 makes a festive gingerbread cookie year round, stamped with the imprint of a smiling Chewbacca. It’s not the crisp, structural thing you might expect, but soft and yielding, almost like a melty Anzac biscuit, with a pronounced caramel sweetness to temper the spice.

You’d be right to expect great things from a woman whose previous business was exclusively designer iced cookies. Nadine Ingram’s Woolloomooloo bakery is a destination for rustic cake lovers (we spot Kylie Kwong in there grabbing one to go), but her cookie skills are still top notch. There are packets of chocolate chip, or Anzacs at the right time of year, but branch out and get a buccellati, which is like a fig roll, encased in a crisp shell and iced in an orange blossom glaze. You can be classy and get pistachios on top, or go for sprinkles.

Yes, the watermelon cake is Instagram famous, but for simpler thrills a gingerbread biccie shaped like a ninja and clothed in a chocolate keikogi is a little sidekick to your morning coffee sure to turn any frown upside down.

For novelty appeal, you can’t go past this giant cookie studded with M&Ms and miniature chocolate chips. It’s the kind of treat you bring a co-worker when they’ve had a bad day – it's a straight-up mood lifter. The cookie base isn’t a hard snapping biscuit but more granular, somewhere between a Subway cookie and the biscuit base of a tart. And they definitely haven't skimped on the good bits. No matter how this cookie crumbles, you’ll always get heaps of candy in your portion.