Stella Parks’ love for Royal Dansk runs deep. When she was a child, her dad always brought a bright blue tin of the leavened, sweet butter cookies home after his last day of work in December. She took this as a yearly sign that the holidays had begun, and she’d practically inhale the cookies, some shaped like bows and topped with sprinkles, others bare. All were variations of the same basic thematic calculus: sugar and butter.

You’ll find a copycat recipe for Royal Dansk in the pages of BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts , Parks’ wildly popular cookbook released this year. It’s a book that teaches you how to make recipes for trademarked confections—Milky Ways, Fig Newtons, and Nutter Butters—on your own and with confidence, giving logic to the flavors that seem almost illogically delicious.

“They were so crunchy and simple, and luckily just sweet enough,” Parks tells me. “And the tin would smell like cookies long after the treats were gone.”

Parks created her recipe for her Royal Dansk clone cookies by accident one day, she explains. She was trying, and failing, to make a batch of facsimile Girl Scout Trefoils. Parks rolled the dough way too thick and over-baked it just a bit. This resulted in a rather disastrous batch of wannabe Trefoils, but the taste was freakishly close to that of Royal Dansk cookies. So she tried again, this time with the intention of making Royal Dansk cookies, using a cookie press and a lavish amount of sanding sugar to replicate that familiar flavor from her youth.

It’s hard, after all, to emulate the particular sensation you get when eating Royal Dansk cookies, that rare mass-market product that toes the line between affordability and luxury. Affection for this product, sold in the thick of the holiday season, seems hardwired into America's arteries. It's no stretch to say these cookies are iconic, as are the royal blue tins they’re packaged inside. (More than a few of us repurpose these tins for sewing supplies and other utilities and trinkets when we're finished.)