Each soccer season we are encouraged heavily to sell
extremely unhealthy cookie dough
to support our kids’ soccer club.
This is the kind of dough
that you can leave on your counter for SIX months,
freeze/thaw back and forth or leave in the fridge…
and it will be fine.
Perfectly fine!!
Yeah, not exactly stuff you want to push on people you love
and want to live a long healthy life! LOL
Especially when I work so hard on our family eating healthy!
But…
because we love to support the soccer club,
we typically purchase 4 tubs of this stuff each year.
Now these tubs take up quite a lot of space
for the amount of cookies you get from them.
And in our home,
freezer space is at a premium!
You can’t leave them in the fridge very long or else
they dry out… fast.
Not so bad in the freezer, but again,
freezer space is coveted and not to be wasted!
But if you leave them in the freezer
you nearly break a spoon trying to get the dough out
…or you have to wait for it to thaw.
I have used an ice cream scoop and it wasn’t horrible,
but it did break chips and nuts in half,
not very pretty when you bake the cookies.
So, this year I decided to try something new…
Make them more compact, faster & easier to bake!
{Btw, if you’re following this as directions,
now is a good time to take off your rings…
dough does nasty things to rings!}
I dumped the contents of a tub onto a Sil Pat (or any flexible non-stick surface)
and started squishing it into a long lump.
At this point I wasn’t going for pretty! LOL
Then I wrapped the Sil Pat around the dough lump-log
and, with very strong hands, gently, but firmly
put pressure in the middle and worked it toward the outsides.
Once it started “extruding” out the ends of my Sil Pat,
I broke the lump-log into two parts,
placing the extra part on wax paper to wait for it’s turn.
Then I repeated the process again by wrapping the Sil Pat around the dough
and doing the same thing as before,
but this time trying to make it very even along the whole log.
A few times I had to unroll the Sil Pat and adjust the dough and start again.
Once I had a “pretty” log,
round or square,
depending on how I held my hands,
I then placed the log onto saran wrap
and wrapped the ends first,
then the sides.
I labeled each with baking temp and time
and, of course, what flavor of cookie it was.
Then I put them on a cookie sheet
and put them in the freezer to flash freeze them.
Once they were solid,
I wrapped them again with wax paper
just to give them a little more protection from freezer burn or drying out.
It probably took me 15 minutes for three tubs
(other than trying to document this for you all)
to do the whole process up to flash freezing.
The benefit of this process is
1) You aren’t giving up nearly as much freezer space!
2) You can use any dough for this process, not just fundraiser cookie dough!
3) You can simply grab a frozen log and slice off the cookies you need.
4) Super fast and easy.
However, this process does nothing to help the nutritional value of the cookies! LOL
But they do taste gooood! 🙂
Disclaimer: photos taken with my cell phone with greasy fingers…
obviously not taken for quality as much as visual to help the process be better understood.