Kitchen Tip & Cookies!

I was making chocolate chip cookie dough on saturday and the leavening agent of choice in cookies is baking soda.  Of course, those stupid baking soda boxes don't lend well to measuring.  I use my baking soda as a cleaning product more often than a cooking product, so I keep the giant box of baking soda under the sink with the rest of my cleaning products.  I had the foresight several years ago to go ahead and put some of the baking soda in one of these tiny round containers for baking purposes before I put the box away.  This is one of the things I take for granted now.  I ran out of baking soda in my container and I was not pleased! (This isn't the first time I've run out, just the most recent.  Old baking soda would be not good.)

So, if you want to save yourself some hassle in the kitchen trying to get your one tablespoon measuring spoon down into the box and coming up with the perfect scoop, just dump your baking soda into a resealable container.  Bonus points:  next time you buy baking soda for your fridge, just dump some into a container and leave it in the cabinet for baking.  You don't need two boxes anymore.  You're welcome.

Let's go back to the chocolate chip cookies:  I love, love fresh chocolate chip cookies.  With a billionty hearts.  I'm just one person though and break and bake cookies are expensive.  Enter the flash freeze. Here's what you need:

• A double batch of cookie dough (don't question me, just do it!),
• A baking sheet,
• Some wax paper, and
• A baller gadget

Take your baller gadget as shown in the above picture and scoop out some dough.  I normally pack the dough down against the edge of my bowl to try to get uniform cookies.

Place the dough balls down on a baking sheet lined with wax paper.  Fill that paper up!

When your sheet gets full, put another sheet of wax paper on top.  Keep scooping and dropping those cookies!

It's a cookie-paper sandwich!  Once you are out of dough, you lick the bowl place the sheet of dough balls in the freezer for a few hours.  This is called flash freezing.  Once the balls are nice and stiff (hehe), pull them off the wax paper and drop them into freezer bags.  A double batch of dough yields me about 120 cookies for about $6.  This saves a bunch of money and you know exactly what you are getting.

"But what about the cook time, Elle?"  Typically you would bake these cookies not from frozen for about 10 minutes at 350F.  I bake my cookies fresh from the freezer for about 12 minutes at 375F.

Do any of you have some great kitchen tips you would like to share or favorite blogs for that kind of stuff?  Leave me a comment and let me know.  Happy hump day!