Hey foodies! So you know how cookies always taste best when they are warm from the oven? I made some chocolate chip cookies last night and I thought I would share a simple tip so that you can have oven-fresh cookies any time and still make the recipe yourself however you want (as opposed to the pre-made doughs you can buy in the store). I also have another tip about keeping brown sugar soft, and what to do when you forgot to leave the butter out to soften.
Brown sugar bears are your friend for keeping brown sugar from turning into a rock. They are made of clay and you soak them in water and throw them in your brown sugar container. If you don't have anything like these (I think anything terra cotta would work, though I bought mine purpose-made) or you left the sugar so long it got hard anyway (though it's been several months since I used any of mine, and it was 98% soft with these), you can always put brown sugar in a low heat oven and it will melt the molasses, making it soft and useable again!
Most of the bag was still soft when I pulled it out last night, but I did find one solid rock in there that I think was pure molasses, lol. I'll end up having to melt that bit later, I think.
If you forgot to leave the butter on the counter to soften, and it's cold and hard in your fridge when you go to bake, you can just cut it into little pieces the same way you might do to make a pie crust. Between it being smaller and so able to get warm faster, the action of cutting it gets it a bit more warm and soft, too.
Also I'm not gonna lie, cookie dough mixes a lot easier if you just do it with your hands. Get in there like a little kid playing with mud and mush it all together. I gave up on trying to do it with the spoon, lol.
Why yes, I DID eat a few cookies' worth of dough raw, thankyouverymuch
And finally, how to save the dough so you can cook a small batch of cookies at a time and have fresh, warm cookies whenever you want? Spoon it out onto a cookie sheet, and set that in the freezer. Once they are frozen enough that they won't stick together, you can plunk them into a container and back in the freezer, then just pull out however many cookies' worth of dough you want when you want to make more.
For chocolate chip cookies specifically, you know how most recipes tell you to make half the sugar white and half brown? I use all brown. I think it just tastes yummy with more molasses in there. I should try doing half the sweetener as honey sometime and see if I like that, too. I've done that with brownies before, but not chocolate chip cookies. But I imagine it might have a similar effect as the all-brown-sugar. I first did it this way when I was almost out of white sugar but had plenty of brown, and I ended up liking it! So sometimes substitutions can lead to happy accidents. :)
What's your favorite cookie? Let me know in the comments! 😄