Frozen Cookie Dough

Let’s talk about frozen cookie dough for a moment. Sometimes what you need isn’t another recipe, it’s another strategy. Like a simple strategy for how to stash some cookie magic on layaway for another day when you need a little happiness pronto. A strategy, in other words, like the frozen cookie dough recipe below. (And yep, we’re familiar with the strategy of rolling cookie dough into a cylinder, freezing it, and slicing and baking it as needed, and it’s a swell trick…although we find that frozen blobs of cookie dough requires even less effort in those desperate moments. And even more impressive, it allows you to make just a single cookie—well, should you be able to exhibit such restraint.)–Renee Schettler Rossi

LC Almost Instant Gratification Note

This spectacularly practical frozen cookie dough trick enables you to have homemade cookies at practically a moment’s notice. Magical, ain’t it? Even better, it works with practically any cookie dough. Here’s the tricky part. The recipe below calls for the “cookie dough of your choice,” which are breathtakingly beautiful words, aren’t they? But if you’re overwhelmed with the option and need help with which cookie dough to make, below are the cookies we most crave, in no particular order seeing as our preference changes from day to day, hour to hour, moment to moment. What’s your most coveted cookie dough? Let us know in a comment below.

Peanut Butter Cookies
Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Cookies
City Bakery’s Peanut Butter Sandies
Compost Cookies from Momofuku Milk Bar
Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies
Neiman Marcus $250 Cookies
Oatmeal Cookies Any Way You Want Them
Chocolate Cookies

Frozen Cookie Dough

• Quick Glance
• 10 M
• 1 H, 10 M
• Servings vary

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Ingredients

Directions

• 1. Shape the cookie dough into balls (sized per the cookie’s recipe instructions) and arrange them on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Shimmy the baking sheet into your freezer and stash it there until the cookie dough is solid, about 1 hour.
• 2. Transfer the cookie dough balls to a resealable plastic freezer bag and seal tightly, removing as much excess air as you can manage. Label the bag with that particular cookie recipe’s name as well as the specified oven temperature and baking time. Stash the bag of unbaked, unspeakable loveliness in the freezer for up to 1 month.
• 3. When the craving strikes, preheat the oven to the designated temperature and simply arrange as many or as few balls of frozen cookie dough as desired on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Bake according to the interactions, adding 2 to 3 minutes to the original recipe’s baking time to allow for the cookie dough coming straight from the freezer.

Recipe Testers Reviews

Renee Schettler Rossi

I was a cookie dough fiend in my younger years. And I'm still occasionally like that. I'll spare you the details, but suffice it to say, as soon as my sis was old enough to hold a spoon, I taught her the magic of stirring together a bowl of cookie dough just to stash in the fridge. It would last maaaaaaaaybe a couple days. Anyways, this frozen cookie dough recipe or strategy or technique or trick or whatever you want to call it is what I would do with whatever dough managed to escape our fearless and scavenging dough-eating ways. It's easy as can be. I confess that not much cookie dough ever made its way to the oven, even after being frozen. (Ever chip a tooth gnawing frozen cookie dough? Been there, done that.) But the dough that did get baked turned out spectacularly—and with immeasurably less effort and time than stirring together an entire batch at the last moment.