Photo: Claire Lower
As someone who often cooks far more food than she is capable of eating in any given week, my freezer is an incredibly important part of my kitchen. (I just acquired a chest freezer, and wow—what a world.) My freezers let me enjoy the spoils of my labor at a pace that is reasonable. Though I am capable of eating two dozen potato chip cookies before they “go bad,” four out of five doctors agree that it would be “bad” for me.
Most of us are aware that cookie dough freezes incredibly well—scoop it into little balls before you freeze for easy baking—but fewer seem to know that whole, fully baked cookies also freeze beautifully.
How to properly freeze your freshly baked cookies
Freezing cookies is easy: After you’ve eaten as many hot-from-the-oven cookies as you can stomach, let the rest cool completely, then place them on a parchment-lined baking sheet and pop them in the freezer for an hour or two, until frozen solid. Transfer to a plastic freezer bag or other freezer-safe container, and mark it with the date. (I’ve read that cookies stay good in the freezer for up to a month, but I’ve eaten them past that point and they were fine.)
In addition to keeping your cookies from going stale, freezing them allows you to get ahead of holiday cooking-making season, which will be here faster than you think. Decorated cookies will need to be wrapped separately, but you can always freeze a bunch of sugar cookies and decorate them later.
When you’re ready to eat a cookie—or share them with last-minute company—all you have to do is let them sit at room temp for half an hour or warm them in a 350-degree oven for a few minutes. You can also pop them in the microwave for 5-10 seconds, leave them frozen and use them as a base for ice cream sandwiches, or eat them partially frozen (which is actually pretty good).
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