How to Always Have Warm Cookies

Sometimes, you just need a cookie. Just one, maybe two, but definitely warm and fresh from the oven. Or sometimes, the heat in your apartment is broken and you need a legitimate reason to turn on the oven and stand in front of it, and the peanut butter chocolate chip cookie dough in the freezer is as good a reason as any. No? Just me?

Having ready-to-go cookie dough in the freezer at all times is one of my favorite hostess tricks. It's sort of like magic, to have homemade cookies ready in the time it takes to preheat the oven. It's also a great housewarming present, to bake a dozen or so cookies and take the rest frozen so your friends can have more whenever they want. So, how to do it? Easy peasy.



When you make up a batch of cookie dough, set aside a little bit (half the dough, or as few as three or four cookies) for freezing. Scoop out the dough according to the recipe. Meaning, if the dough is dropped onto the cookie sheet in blobs, do that. If it's rolled into balls and rolled in sugar, do that. In the case of my peanut butter cookies, they're dropped by rounded teaspoon then flattened a bit before baking. Set your formed cookie dough onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment or wax paper (or a small plate, if you aren't freezing that many) making sure they're not touching each other. Freeze for at least three hours and up to 24.



Then, take your frozen cookie dough and transfer it to a freezer bag labeled with the type of cookie dough and cooking instructions. Sometimes, if a cookie is better a little undercooked, or when it's browned on top, I'll write myself a note on the bag so I don't forget.

That's it! The frozen dough can go directly from freezer to cookie sheet the next time you have an unexpected guest, or just need to stand in front of a warm oven. Here's the recipe for the peanut butter chocolate chip cookies in this post, they're dreamy.



Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies
Adapted from The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook

1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 cup peanut butter (at room temperature)
3/4 cup sugar (plus more for dusting)
1/2 brown sugar, tightly packed
1 large egg
1 tablespoon milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
3/4 cup chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Mix together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Set aside.

In a large bowl, beat the butter and peanut butter until smooth and fluffy (about three minutes). Add the sugars and mix until incorporated. Add the egg, milk and vanilla and beat thoroughly. Add the flour mixture and stir just until combined. Add the chocolate chips and carefully fold them into the batter.

Fill a small bowl with 2-3 tablespoons of sugar (I used raw sugar, but plain white sugar is fine). Drop rounded teaspoons of dough into the sugar, then transfer to an ungreased baking sheet. Press the dough down slightly with a fork or offset spatula.

Bake for 10-12 minutes, being careful not to over bake them. Allow to cool on the cookie sheet for a minute or two, then transfer to a wire rack to cool.

Party Budget

In her first post as a blogger with the Real Simple Simply Stated blog, Jordan Ferney shared one of her favorite secrets to planning a great party. You can read it here. But what stuck with me is something she mentioned off-hand, that she and her husband have a column in their monthly budget for parties.

What a great idea! Very practical if you find yourself hosting often or attending gift-giving occasions frequently. But it's even more fun to think about the months where there's less celebrating and you end up with a little bit extra. Would you save it up for a few months and do something big? Or throw a random little get-together, just because? I'm totally adding this into my monthly budget.

image via Jordan Ferney for Oh Happy Day.

The dough also rises

Baking with yeast is intimidating to bakers and non-bakers alike. I mean, we're talking about something alive. That is serious stuff. But when yeast does its job (instead of, say, stealing your evening and giving you flat, dense rolls better suited for a game of hockey than being nestled into a bread basket) the process is simpler than you might think. If it didn't require so much time, it'd be easy to convince yourself that a magic wand was responsible.

So when my friend Amy, newlywed and novice baker, announced that she was going to attempt my favorite sticky bun recipe to have waiting for her husband when he returned from a weekend away, I jumped at the chance to convert a yeast-phobe to (at the very least) a yeast-liker. Full disclosure: I may also have jumped at the chance to use their brand new Kitchen Aid stand mixer.

{ingredients, ready to go}

{Amy, prooving that she did most of the work herself}

So we spent a sunny, cold afternoon in January in Amy's kitchen with the mixer and a packet of thankfully cooperative yeast. I thought I'd share the few tips I shared with Amy that day, the few things I've learned that make baking with yeast less intimidating:

• Rapid Rise Yeast: though it requires a few tweaks to most recipes (heating the liquid ingredients), they may as well call it "Never Fail Yeast." Use this to get the hang of how yeast should behave in a dough, then try the recipe with regular yeast. 
• Elasticity: A lot of recipes have you knead the dough until elastic. Which means what, exactly? When you press a finger into the dough it should 1) not stick to your finger and 2) bounce back quickly. If it bounces back lazily and the dough feels somewhat hard when you poke it, keep kneading. 
• Warmth: No matter the season, my apartment is never warm enough to encourage yeast to rise at a normal pace. So to help it along, I preheat the oven to a low temperature then turn it off before putting the dough in to rise.
• Moisture: Yeast likes warm, moist heat. So sometimes I'll put a pot of boiling water in the oven with the rising dough to help it along. The added moisture in the oven also helps to keep the dough from drying out.

{sticky buns, ready for their final rise}

{success!}

Amy and I did most of the work the day before she planned on baking them. The next morning she let them rise a final time before baking. Judging from the photo she sent, it looks like they turned out perfectly. And if it weren't for the photo evidence of the baking process, I'd bet you could convince her husband that a magic wand was involved.


(Pardon the dorky literary pun in the title, I couldn't resist.)