cookies on demand

Monday, mar. 5, 2007   |   0 comments

Here’s a new trick I learned from my friend Sophia: Make up a batch of cookie dough, drop the individual dough balls onto a cookie sheet and flatten them a tad just like your fixing to bake them, only FREEZE THEM INSTEAD! And then when they’re nice and icy, put them into a freezer-safe delayed-enjoyment bag:

This way, whenever you want a hot, fresh cookie injection, you just put one or three frozen doughlets onto a cookie sheet, and pop them in the oven for maybe a minute or two longer than you would normally.

My modified Toll House recipe works especially well: I use just 2 cups of flour (versus the 2-1/4 cups the recipe calls for), double the vanilla (from 1 teaspoon to 2), and instead of chopping the nuts, I use toasted whole pecans.

Then the second those heavenly brown orbs are cool enough to touch — but still melty-melty — go ahead and pound them right into your cookie hole. I like mine paired with a towering glass of iced coffee.

This approach provides a triple bonus: Not only do you get fresh-from-the-oven cookies, which as everybody knows is when cookies are at their very best, and not only does your house fill up with that cookie smell night after night after night, but it slows the typical cookie-eating frenzy down to a sanely glacial pace. Much like the self-administered morphine drip I had in the hospital, the Freezer Cookie Method gives me just enough of what I need without letting me go completely overboard. So where usually a batch of cookies is safe only two, maybe three days around the dangerous gravitational pull of this here mouth of mine, this way I can make a batch last weeks and weeks.

Though of course this method only works if I manage to keep myself from eating the frozen dough, which seems to be my new problem. Sigh! Mayhaps the time has come for a Shockolate Vault?