I think we all know that when it comes to the holiday season baking cookies is a big part. This past week we were in the kitchen making cookies for our son’s cookie exchange party at school, so of course we decided to share some of our top cookie making tips. From the ingredients and process to some helpful equipment tips, we hope this post gives you some cookie inspiration for the season!

Recipe, Ingredients, and Process Tips

• Room Temperature Ingredients: There is a reason to make sure certain items are room temperature. It allows the ingredients to incorporate properly and it will generally give you a smoother dough. This will mostly be things such as butter, eggs, milk, and/or cream cheese. Also keep in mind that there is a big difference between room temperature and melted. Room temperature items such as butter and cream cheese will still hold their shape.
• Chilling the Dough: If your recipe calls for chilling the dough, do it. This will help your cookies keep their shape during cooking. I think we have all seen some cookies that have just turned into blobs because the dough did not get chilled. Chilling the dough also gives a better texture.
• Avoid Overmixing the Dough: When mixing your dough, you really want it to just come together and then stop mixing. It will already be worked again when you are rolling it out, so minimally mixing it before chilling will help avoid overmixing. Overmixing your dough can make the cookies dense.
• Similar Shape, Size, and Thickness: When cutting your cookies whether you are using cookie cutters or scooping it’s important to make sure they are uniform in size. This allows for even cooking throughout the whole tray of cookies. Think about if you had one huge cookie and the rest were much smaller. Either the large cookie would cook, and the others would burn, or the others would cook, and the large cookie would be undercooked. Adjusting thickness of your cookies can also adjust how chewy or crunchy they turn out.
• Let Cookies Cool Before Decorating: This may seem obvious, but it’s still definitely an important tip. If you jump into decorating your cookies too soon after they have been taken out of the oven, the icing and toppings will just melt off, so make sure to give them plenty of time to cool.
• Store Cookies by Type: If you are making a variety of cookies (ex: gingerbread, sugar, chocolate chip, peanut butter) make sure to put them in separate containers. This allows them to keep their own flavor. Storing them together can cause flavors to mingle and make for some ‘interesting’ cookie combinations.

Equipment for the Win!

• Parchment: Use to have easy clean up and for no cookie sticking. A silicon mat could also be used.
• Digital Scale: This helps with precise measuring, which is definitely helpful with baking.
• Scoops: Remember our tip on cookie size above? Using a scoop will help keep each cookie the same amount which allows for even cooking and uniform cookies.
• Cooling/ Wire Racks: When cookies come out of the oven, they need to be removed from the sheet trays or they will continue to cook. Cooling racks allow for airflow all around the cookies, which will help them cool quicker. It will also keep hot humid air from being trapped underneath the cookies, which would make them soggy.
• Oven Calibration: Know whether the oven you will be using is properly calibrated (even temperature distribution). Depending on how it cooks you will want to rotate your trays as your cookies cook, so that they evenly cook.

Recipe Inspiration

Have fun with your cookie making. Don’t be afraid to try out different flavors, mix ins, icings, toppings and decorations. There are so many ways to change up your everyday chocolate chip, sugar and peanut butter cookies. Think about adding in things like different spices, extracts, nuts, dried fruits or sprinkles. Of course, don’t go overboard and add everything we said in one cookie, but definitely experiment with some new and exciting ingredients. Below we are sharing some that we think would turn out extra special. Let us know if you try any!

• Lemon Curd Linzer: Add in some lemon zest into your sugar cookie dough. Use lemon curd in place of the traditional jam.
• Cranberry Orange Spice Cookie: Add in some orange extract and dried cranberries into your snickerdoodle cookie dough.
• Peppermint Bark Chip Cookie: Instead of regular chocolate chips, chop up some peppermint bark as a mix in. You could also add in candy cane pieces into your regular chocolate chip cookie mix.

We hope these tips find you well in this post and can’t wait to share more tips for the season! Remember to have tons of fun while cooking this holiday season, we know from experience that it just makes it all more enjoyable, especially if you have friends and family helping.

If you haven’t joined our Facebook group Meal Planning for Busy Parents yet, please check it out HERE. That is where you can find our community and easily chat with us. We also go live every Friday to answer your questions and talk about all kinds of cooking and meal planning topics. We’ll see you in the next post!