Warming the pans while your page comes together
Seasonal & Local · 4 min read
July 14, 2026
Somewhere between the first Advent candle and Christmas Eve, kitchens across Iceland fill with the smell of butter, cardamom, and burnt sugar. This is jólabakstur — Christmas baking — and for many Icelandic families it is as central to the season as the tree or the presents. The centerpiece of it all is smákökur: literally "small cakes," or what most of us would just call cookies.
Unlike a single showstopper dessert, smákökur are about variety. The goal isn't one perfect cake — it's a full tin, or several tins, holding half a dozen different kinds of cookies, ready to offer whoever knocks on the door in December.
Ask an Icelander how many kinds of cookies you're "supposed" to bake before Christmas, and you'll often hear the same number: thirteen. It's a playful nod to the thirteen Yule Lads who visit one by one in the nights leading up to Christmas — one troll-ish visitor, one tin of cookies. Nobody actually counts the tins in most households, and thirteen is more folklore than obligation, but it captures something real about the custom: variety matters more than quantity of any single kind.
In practice, most families settle on four to eight kinds each year, often repeating favorites and rotating one or two new recipes in.
If you're building your own smákökur lineup, a few types show up in almost every Icelandic tin:
None of these require exotic ingredients. What they require is time — and a plan.
Baking six kinds of cookies in one afternoon sounds chaotic, and it can be, unless the work is split sensibly:
If you're coordinating a baking day across a busy household, it helps to treat it like any other meal-planning task: decide which recipes you're making ahead of time, list the ingredients once, and shop in a single trip rather than three. Matinn's works just as well for a baking marathon as it does for weekday dinners — block out the baking day, attach your recipes, and let the shopping list build itself.
The best smákökur tins are usually the ones built up over years — a grandmother's piparkökur recipe here, a friend's sörur variation there. If you're starting from scratch, or want to save the family versions so they don't get lost, keeping them together in one place makes next December easier. Matinn's lets you save and organize the recipes you come back to every year, so the hunt for "that one cookie recipe" doesn't have to start over every December.
There's no fixed rule. The "thirteen kinds" idea is a nod to the Yule Lads rather than a real requirement — most households comfortably manage four to eight varieties, especially if dough is made ahead in batches.
Yes, for most types. Butter-based doughs like vanillukransar and piparkökur generally freeze well for a few weeks; just let the dough come closer to room temperature before rolling or pressing.
Smákökur specifically refers to small baked cookies, as distinct from other seasonal treats like kleinur (fried dough) or laufabrauð (thin fried bread), which belong to their own traditions.
Most baking happens in the two to three weeks before Christmas, often spread across a few weekends rather than done in a single day, partly because of how many different cookies are typically made.