Modern Femme at Home...Freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, anytime

Hello my dear readers.  Apologies for my absence - last week is a blur, but suffice to say that Bebe was battling his first full fledged cold, and wasn't sleeping very well.  I think we're almost out of the tunnel (I hope), and I'm back and brimming with things to talk about!

Anyway, here's a quick and happy post to start off this Monday.  This weekend I made chocolate chip cookies for Mr. MF.  Doesn't matter how old my gent gets, he still loves his chocolate chip cookies.  We're trying to cut back on expenses in the MF household, including buying pre-made products that we could make at home. Actually, I think that homemade chocolate chip cookies trump most anything you could buy at the store anyway, never mind them being cheaper!

But because chocolate chip cookies taste best fresh, and because right now it's only Mr. MF and moi in the house right now who eat solid foods, I don't ever bake a full batch of cookies.  I'll bake maybe 10 cookies, and then freeze the rest of the dough.  I know that this is not rocket science - most of us have seen blog posts on frozen cookie dough on the web.  But here's what I do that makes this post a little different:  I don't freeze the dough in logs to be sliced at a later date.  I scoop out the dough in individual sized balls, and then freeze them as is. 

I prefer my method for two reasons:  1) I am not usually the person baking the frozen cookies from the freezer, so this needs to be as fool-proof as possible; and 2) by freezing the dough in individual sized portions, you don't need to wrangle with a knife to slice off some rounds of dough, you simply grab as many frozen pieces as you want and you're set!  No muss, no fuss, not even a knife to clean up!

I like to store around four to five frozen pieces of dough in snack-sized bags, so that when Mr. MF is hungry, he can open the freezer, retrieve a baggie, and bake himself some yummy cookies.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  Here's a break out of what I did, with some random pictures at the end (because of course I forgot to take pictures during the process):

1.  Make your cookie dough.  I like the recipe on the back of the Nestle chocolate chip bag.

2.  Prep two baking sheets - line one with Silpat or parchment paper (this will be baked immediately), and line a second with wax paper (this will go into the freezer).

3. Spoon out heaping tablespoons of dough onto the prepared sheets.  Place as many tablespoons of dough as you want cookies baked onto the silpat-lined sheet.  Scoop out the remainder of the dough onto the wax paper-lined sheet.  Place the wax paper-lined sheet into the freezer, leave for 2 hours or overnight.

4.  Bake the cookies as instructed, try not to eat all of them immediately.

5. When the 2 hours (or more) is up, pull the now frozen cookie dough out of the freezer.

6.  Place the frozen scoops of dough into individual Ziploc baggies (snack sized fits 4 scoops, any more requires a sandwich sized bag).   I like to also write the oven temp and amount of time needed for baking on some masking tape, which I then stick to the outside of each bag.  That way, whoever needs some cookies can bake them without any need for assistance from me!  Repeat process until all frozen dough is bagged:

6. After all the baggies have been assembled, I like to wrangle them into one larger gallon-sized bag, which I label with the contents and the date.  That way, I don't have these little bags scattered all over the freezer - and, more importantly - it makes it easy for the hungry cookie-monsters to find and identify!

I love this on so many levels: 

1.  I feel prepared for any emergency snack/sweet tooth attack/unexpected company knowing that there are baggies of cookies ready to be baked at any time;

2. I'm happy to be able to feed my family homemade cookies instead of store bought ones, which are expensive and filled with preservatives; and

3.  By making and storing dough like this, you are stretching your dollar - my husband will go through the contents of this bag over a month, as opposed to over a week with a store bought pack of cookies. I find that when a packet of cookies is readily available, people will eat them even when they're not hungry...and there's also nothing more annoying than throwing out expensive cookies that went stale.

So there you have it folks!  Try doing this sometime - doesn't take but a few extra minutes of hands-on time, and the reward - fresh baked cookies at anytime - is more than worth it!

xoxo,

MF