HOW TO FREEZE COOKIE DOUGH TO BAKE LATER

I had to wait until at least after Halloween to post this. Why you might ask? Well, I just think it is terrible when I see Christmas stuff in the store before Halloween has even come.

But it has now so.....

It is hard to believe that Thanksgiving is less that a month away and that means Christmas is not far behind. 

What is one thing that Christmas, especially, brings to mind?

wait for it.....




wait for it.....



If you guessed Cookies, you are right.

Every year I try to get my friends to do a Cookie Exchange with me and every year I hit a wall. You see most of my friends don't bake that much anymore.

It doesn't take Christmas coming for me to bake cookies though. If you follow my blog, you know I don't like to have an empty cookie jar in my kitchen.
Most of the time I look for recipes that only make a couple of dozen of cookies though because I like variety. 

Recently I discovered how to prepare cookie dough and then freeze the dough to bake at a later date. I have made the slice and bake cookies where you make the cookie dough into a log and freeze it to later slice however many cookies you want to bake at the time. I have bought the tubs of cookie dough from children selling it for a fundraiser at their school, but I have never experimented with making the dough and then freezing it myself.

Well, it is so easy and handy to do. I told my husband (after he ate one of the Pumpkindoodles I baked with this method) that I will be doing this more often when I mix up a recipe that makes a lot of cookies. 

With the weeks ahead, this is a perfect way to have a variety of cookies on hand for those drop-in guests or just when you want to have friends over. You can bake a few of your "stash" that you have in your freezer. They will be so impressed. They will think you have been slaving for days.

A couple of weeks ago I made a second batch of Pumpkindoodles and baked only about a dozen and a half at that time. Then I made up the rest of the dough in balls and froze them for a few hours and then stored them in a freezer ziplock bag until I was ready to bake a few more. They turned out perfect when I baked two for my husband and me on Sunday.

Here are some pictures showing exactly what I did....

How to Freeze Cookie Dough to Bake Later...

Prepare cookie dough up to the point you would normally put them on a cookie sheet to bake. (I rolled the Pumpkindoodles in the cinnamon sugar and placed them on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. Remember you are freezing them, so you can place them close together just not touching.)

  
Then cover the cookie sheet with plastic wrap.

After a few hours, remove them from the freezer and uncover...

Place balls in a ziplock bag... and label the bag... (I use smaller storage bags ...

and then place the storage bag into a larger freezer bag. That way the freezer bag stays clean and I can use it more than one time.)

When I was ready to make two cookies for us Sunday afternoon, I removed two of the "balls" and placed them (still frozen) on a parchment lined cookie sheet.

I wasn't sure if they would be done in the normal cooking time since they were frozen, but they were.

14 minutes later....

The directions for the Pumpkindoodles said to leave the baked cookies on the cookie sheet for 5 minutes...

and then I removed them to finish cooling on a wire rack.

(My husband's didn't stay too long on the wire rack....ha. Then the next day he asked me if I had eaten the other cookie. The other cookie! Can you believe it. I told him the other cookie was MINE!))

One more tip....

Since I had to go back to my original recipe to see oven temperature and baking instructions, I decided to write that information on the storage bag. Next time I won't have to go back and research it.