One of the food groups I didn’t grow to like until my adult years were figs and dates (perhaps it was all the little seeds) – but now I love them. Figs and dates are found commonly as cookie fillings throughout the Mediterranean, and one of the most popular varieties is Ma’amoul from Lebanon. Ma’amoul are sweet semolina flour cookies filled with date paste (the filling may also include pistachios or walnuts), and usually shaped in wooden molds (though they can also be made and decorated by hand, as below). In Lebanon, they are popular around Easter, but they are now popularly eaten in the region to coincide with other holidays as well. So nowadays you can find Ma’amoul pretty much any time of the year! Here is a recipe with variations for date, pistachio and walnut filled Ma’amoul, and a version that combines dates, pistachios and walnuts into a single filling.
Ma’amoul by Hisham Assaad
A few weeks ago we did a feature on the surprising 
We were doing a search for “German cookies” in Instagram when we came across a series of photos of near-identical cookies with the same fork impressions, with Chinese captions. Come to find out that the name for these Chinese cookies, popular around Lunar New Year, is “German Cookies” (德式酥饼). German cookies require little more than potato starch (which can be found in most Asian groceries) and sugar, and you can find easy recipes at 
Eating The World 