I am a huge advocate of making cookie dough in advance so you save time on your actual “baking day.” For some reason, I am not only always making a terrible mess in the kitchen, which I hate cleaning up when I’m done with everything, but I feel like Christmas Cookie baking takes forever!!
One of the reasons may be because I usually make too many cookies. I underestimate the size of the batches and always have the mentality “too many cookies is better than not enough cookies!” One Christmas, several years back, I decided I wanted to make a bunch of Christmas Tree cookies and decorate them all differently. I ended up making WAY too many…319 cookies to be exact (yes, I counted them).
By the time I made the dough, baked the cookies, let them cool. cleaned up my mess, and got halfway through decorating them it was 3:00am! I was so exhausted at this point, that I actually ended up getting my younger sister out of bed and paid her to finish decorating them for me!!!!! Too bad for her that I’m married now…she could make some decent money from me this time of year if she lived with me!
To make it a more fun and less stressful experience, I now try to make my cookie dough in advance. If you have a busy work schedule (and a long commute) like me, it’s easy to make a couple batches of your favorite cookie dough in the evenings and then store in your refrigerator or freezer. The dough can be stored in an airtight container or wrapped in wax paper. I would recommend keeping in in the fridge if you are going to bake the cookies within a week or so, but you can also store it for longer if you put it in the freezer!
Happy baking!!
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