The Biggest Cookie in the World

These super-sweet treats are the favourite of kids around the globe – and more than a few adults too! Many people love giant cookies, though it’s fair to say the entries on the list of the world’s biggest cookies are in a league of their own.

The word cookie most likely comes from the Dutch word koekje, meaning ‘little cake’. For as long as baking has been in the historical record, cookies in one form or another have existed.

The first cookies that we might recognise today are believed to have originated in the Middle East around the seventh century. By the fourteenth century, they were common throughout Europe. The Americans were introduced to the cookie thanks to the Dutch settlers in the 1620s. A century later, the modern method of making cookies, creaming butter and sugar together, developed. Since then we haven’t looked back!

Let’s find out how many eggs were used in the biggest cookie in the world and also discover the size of the largest gingerbread man ever made and the world’s biggest fortune cookie. Here are the contenders for the biggest cookie ever made.

It may not be the world’s biggest cookie but American chef Nick DiGiovanni and Malaysian comedian Nigel Ng, better known as Uncle Roger, made the biggest fortune cookie in the world in November 2022. The cookie, which took about four hours to make, weighed 1.47 kilograms and measured 40 cm x 17 cm. If you want to make a bigger one, you can find out how fortune cookies are made here!

It was a very happy Christmas in 2013 for the bakers of the world’s largest Saint Nicholas cookie. It isn’t the world’s largest cookie but it comes close. It was baked by the proprietors of Café Ostermann in the German town of Paderborn to celebrate St. Nicholas Day. The spectacular spiced santa weighed 50 kg and was made from eighty eggs and ten kilograms of butter.

Did you know, the world’s first gingerbread men were created on the instructions of Queen Elizabeth I in the sixteenth century? She had these classic cookies made in the likeness of some of her VIP guests! Since then, the quest to bake the biggest gingerbread man in the world and vie for the title of biggest cookie in the world continues.

The current record holder is IKEA Furuset in Oslo, Norway. In 2009, they baked a gingerbread man weighing 651 kg. The previous record was held by the town of Smithville, Texas. Their gingerbread man ‘Smitty’ was one of the world’s giant cookies. He weighed 593 kilograms and consisted of 340 kilograms of flour, 185 litres of molasses and 864 eggs.

From 1996 until 2003, New Zealand-based biscuit business Cookie Time held the world record for the biggest cookie ever made. Their giant chocolate chip cookie covered an area of 487 square metres, it had a diameter of 24.9 metres and was 2.5 centimetres thick. The ingredients for this colossal cookie included –

• 2.5 tonnes of chocolate – over one million chocolate chips
• 3.1 tonnes of sugar
• 2 tonnes of butter
• 24,000 eggs
• 4.5 tonnes of flour

It was cooked in a field behind their factory in the city of Christchurch on a huge hotplate heated by dozens of gas burners.

There are giant cookies, and then there’s this. In 2003, the Immaculate Baking Company in Flat Rock, North Carolina baked the biggest cookie in the world to raise money for a local folk art museum. It was a staggering feat of culinary craft. It weighed eighteen tonnes and had a diameter of 30.7 metres. The ingredients for the world’s biggest cookie included –

• 5.4 tonnes of flour
• 2.2 tonnes of granulated sugar
• 1.5 tonnes of dark brown sugar
• 2.9 tonnes of unsalted butter
• 30,000 eggs
• 83 kilograms of salt
• 36 kilograms of baking powder
• 38 litres of vanilla extract
• 10 million chocolate chip chunks

In the weeks before the cookie was due to be baked, hundreds of batches of cookie dough were prepared and frozen by volunteers. To bake the cookie, eight months of tests resulted in a temporary oven made from a base of gravel, a layer of pearlite – the white stuff used in potting soil – and then dozens of sheets of aluminium which served as the pan. The ‘oven’ was covered with polyester film to keep the heat inside and over twenty heaters got up to almost 400 degrees centigrade.

It took about twelve hours to cook through and when it was done, the most giant of giant cookies was cut up and sold in commemorative boxes for $10 each. They raised around $20,000 for the museum fund.

So there we have it. The world’s biggest cookies.