Keep a roll of frozen cookie dough on stand-by for instant gifting

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#Food#baking#gifts#great-ideas

Slice ’em, rainbow sprinkle ’em, and gift ’em! (Photo by: D. Sharon Pruitt – CC BY 2.0)

It’s the start of the holiday season, which means gifts are on everyone’s mind. On our post about hostess gift ideas, Offbeat Homie Rachel had a simple-yet-genius way to make gifting easy-peasy:

I make a large batch of cookie dough every couple of months, then roll it into a long sausage and freeze it. If I’m invited somewhere, or a friend breaks up with their partner, whatever… I just cut a couple of slices and bake them and I have a warm plate of cookies with almost no effort.

About the Author: Megan Finley Horowitz

@meggyfin @meggyfin

I'm a 40-year-old potty-mouthed writer with late-diagnosed ADHD and a shit-ton of anxiety. I live in my hometown of Los Angeles with a husband, a daughter I never planned on having, and a senior rescue dog. Anything else you need to know can be gleaned from my instagram and my TikTok.

Comments on Keep a roll of frozen cookie dough on stand-by for instant gifting

  1. I did this last year but more so my husband and I could have instant cookies (sure, I meant to give them to my neighbour, but I didn’t quite manage it. 🙂 Our freezer is a little too cold to be able to slice cookie dough (I’ve never had a ton of luck doing that, even when I bought Pilsbury stuff) but another option is to pre-portion your cookies. I made peanut butter cookies and I just rolled all the dough into balls and then set them out separately on a baking tray to freeze so none of them stuck. Then, once they were frozen, I bagged them and put them back in the freezer. Got the idea from a local fancy bakery that sells their cookie dough that way.

    • Pre-portioning also works well with not-so-sliceable doughs such as chocolate chip cookie dough — just roll it in balls and freeze them. I’m debating pre-making the dough for a bunch of my Christmas cookies, but we’ll see when I actually get to making the dough — if it’s close enough to Christmas, I’ll just freeze the cookies instead. I want to make the truffles first, so that I can use the leftover dipping chocolate for the cookies and things — even with that reuse, my spreadsheet says I need 5 lbs of chocolate for this Christmas. I take Christmas baking serious, y’all.

        • Yay! Friends! 😀 (However, I suspect your motives may be less than pure… :p)

          That’s really just the dark chocolate — I wasn’t counting the unsweetened or the white (which doesn’t really count, anyway…). 15 recipes. 4.93 lbs of dark chocolate, 10 oz unsweetened chocolate, 2 oz white chocolate. 23 eggs. Nearly 5 lbs of butter. My spreadsheet ain’t messin’ around: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AocYyLZSaX7CdEswcHFSYWpfbUpzTGRwRDVSNUdSY0E&usp=sharing

          • I was prepared to be impressed by your baking, but I’m more impressed by your organizational skills. That spreadsheet is making me all hot and bothered…

            ***Edited**** I mean, seriously, dude…DAMN. That is impressive…

          • Why have I never thought of using a spreadsheet for my holiday cookies before?!? I baked about 30 dozen last year and did all these calculations with a calculator, one at a time. I’m baking more this year and using a spreadsheet to keep it all straight.

          • I do a similar thing, but you clearly have that spreadsheet thing perfected. I might borrow it for this year 🙂

          • Aww, I’m glad you all like my spreadsheet so much! It’s been several years in the making. I give truffles and cookies and squares as pretty much all of my Christmas gifts, as well as bringing them to several Christmas gatherings, and we have family members with a variety of dietary restrictions (gluten free, dairy free (but can have butter), problems with different nuts…), and I’m not the type of person who can keep all this stuff in her head, so there’s no way I can keep everything straight without organizing the heck out of it.
            (Did you find all the hidden columns with extra recipes? It’s got over 4o, only 15 of which are shown…)

      • 5 pounds of chocolate – pffft. I’m halfway through a 25 pound bag of sugar for holiday time candymaking already.

        Seriously though, that spreadsheet is a thing of beauty. And bless your heart for chocolate dipping truffles. Far too time consuming for my taste. I’ll stick to caramels and marshmallows.

  2. Most kinds of cookies can be frozen after being baked too. My family does this so we always have sweets for drop-in guests. If you’re really in a hurry you can warm them in the oven or microwave, but they will thaw to room temperature on their own in about 30 minutes.

  3. Man, where is a good “Dear God, why didn’t I think of this before?!?” .gif when you need one??

    This is genius. I also love the portioning idea above; I could spend one weekend mixing and portioning and then spend the rest of the month looking like Billy Gifting Badass…

    Plus? COOKIE DOUGH**. Though having easy-access portion-sized cookie dough in the fridge might not be a great idea.

    **I know it’s not good to eat raw cookie dough. I like to live on the edge.

    • Raw cookie dough is delicious! I’d much rather live fully (i.e. eat cookie dough) with the risks inherent in that than live my life in constant fear that something bad might happen. Besides, eggs only very rarely have salmonella in them. It’s a calculated risk. 😀

      • I think most of the tubes of dough you buy at stores use pasteurized eggs so you don’t have to worry about the eggs.

        However, and I hate to say this – I read that when there *was* an issue with a pre-packaged cookie dough (Tollhouse, maybe?) a few years back, they actually linked it back to contaminated flour. So it’s not just the eggs that are a concern for bad stuff 🙁

        *EDIT* Actually, it was E. coli in the flour. My bad!

      • Good Lord Almighty… You’re trying to kill me, and I love you for it.

        Would anyone judge me if I kept a bag of this in the fridge and just snitched bits out with a spoon every now and then?
        No?
        Thank you, you’re all beautiful people…

        • One night I was craving cookies, and realized I had all the ingredients on hand except eggs. I was bummed until I realized this meant I could make just straight up RAW COOKIE DOUGH. 🙂

    • I think the mass market cookie dough is so processed there’s not much chance of salmonella. When I was in high school I’d buy a tube of dough and eat it throughout the day, and while that’s pretty gross to think about now I never got salmonella poisoning.

      Not that I condone eating raw dough, especially if you’ve got a weakened immune system for any reason, but… I’m sure it’s fine.

    • I’m pregnant, and I’ve been trying to avoid eating raw egg, no eating batter drips when making pancakes or waffles, I’ve even quit eating cake batter off the beaters…but I told my husband that I will be eating the raw cookie dough.

      So that’s that.

  5. I can’t keep cookie dough in the house in any form but it’s a brilliant idea for everybody else.
    I think if I could keep some though I would pre-slice before freezing. I would freeze them on wax paper and then after they’re frozen store them in a bag.

  6. My mom used to do this! We’d make batches of chocolate chip cookies, roll them into balls, drop on a baking sheet to freeze, then transfer them to bags once they were frozen. We never added extra baking time; pull them out of the freezer, turned the over on, by the time it was heated they were thawed enough. I wonder why we stopped doing this…it is simply brilliant!

    PS I eat raw cookie dough, lick the beater after making a cake…and I have never gotten salmonella poisoning.

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