Name: Frozen Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough
Prep time: 10 min
Total time: 1 h 10 min
Cuisine: American
Ingredients: 1 batch cookie dough of your choice

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This frozen chocolate chip cookie dough shows you how to stash your favorite dough in the freezer so you can bake up as many (or few) cookies as you like when a craving hits.

Balls of frozen chocolate chip cookie dough on a parchment-lined baking sheet.

Adapted from Lindsay Landis | The Cookie Dough Lover's Cookbook | Quirk, 2012

Let’s talk frozen cookie dough for a moment. Sometimes what you need isn’t another recipe, it’s a strategy. 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. So on a desperate day, you can easily plop frozen blobs of cookie dough that you wisely made weeks ago in anticipation of a future craving on a baking sheet and have homemade chocolate chip cookies at a moment’s notice. And, even more impressively, it allows you to make just a single cookie—should you be able to exhibit such restraint. Almost instant gratification.–Renee Schettler Rossi

Frozen Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough

Quick Glance
Quick Glance
10 M
1 H, 10 M
Makes 36 servings

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Ingredients

For the cookie dough
1 batch cookie dough of your choice

Directions

Freeze the cookie dough

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.

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.

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 original recipe’s instructions, adding 2 to 3 minutes to the baking time to allow for the cookie dough coming straight from the freezer. Originally published May 17, 2015.

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Recipe Testers' Reviews

Renee Schettler

I was a cookie dough fiend in my younger years. 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. Between the two of us, 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.