The Lazy Genius Podcast - #25: The Lazy Genius Bakes Cookies

Episode Date: June 5, 2017

1. Get my favorite Lazy Genius cookie baking tools! a stand mixer paddle attachment with a spatula attached a cookie scoop for perfect and quick cookies my favorite spatulas 2. Get extra baking tips. Here's a baking miniseries I did awhile back. Day One: To Sift or Not to Sift Day Two: Why Can't I Soften Butter In the Microwave? Day Three: A Freezer Primer Day Four: Ingredient Speed Dating Day Five: Essential Chocolate Cake Day Six: Blank Canvas Cake Day Seven: Essential Breakfast Recipes Day Eight: My Favorite Dessert Cookbooks 3. Bake the best cookies ever. My favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe ever Chocolate chip cookies with no gluten or dairy that still taste incredible An oatmeal raisin cookie recipe that will make you actually like oatmeal raisin cookies from Smitten Kitchen Benedict Cumberbatch becomes a cookie, i.e. the Cumbercookie This podcast is hosted by Kendra Adachi and executive produced by Kendra Adachi, Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey guys, you're listening to The Lazy Genius Podcast. I'm Kendra and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. Today's episode I'm so excited about the lazy genius makes cookies. It's our 25th episode and I'm so excited about it. I feel like something about the number 25 means it needs to be marked by something important and what is more important than cookies. So here's what we're going to talk about today. Cookies are great. obviously but in this episode I'm going to teach you how to make them even better we're

going to be geniuses about cookies you guys like straight up geniuses I'm so excited can you tell you tell about my voice and the fact that I'm a tiny bit out of breath because we're about to talk about cookies and I'm so excited okay so here's what we're going to do in the playbook today we're going to talk about four things when it comes to cookies baking cleaning, storing, and eating. I actually have things to say about the eating. So there you go. Okay, but the baking is the big part. So let's start there. Baking cookies. Let's be geniuses about baking cookies. All right, let's talk about butter first. We're going to talk about butter, sugar, salt, how you mix, scooping them, and the temperature that you cook them at. So it's like lots of good,

lots of good, sciencey cookie things. All right, let's talk about your butter temperature. So I had someone recently on Instagram, message me with a picture of chocolate chip cookies or some cookie that she had just made and said, why do my cookies look like this? I make them a lot and they don't usually look like this. They were a lot flatter. They were crinkly around the edges. It's not that they were bad, but they were different. They weren't like tall, kind of fluffy, chewy cookies. They were a little bit paler in the middle and flat and wrinkly on the sides. I think you know what I'm talking about. And she said, what happened to my cookies? And I said, did you? was your, what was the temperature of your butter?

What was the deal with your butter this day? And she kind of sheepishly was like, well, I did have to put it in the microwave because I didn't have time to soften it. And so it got a little melty. That's why. Okay. The most important piece of making cookies that make you super happy is the butter temperature. Okay. All right.

So here's what you do. butter should not be melted unless your recipe says hey put melted butter in this which there are cookies to do that like for real i've baked some and they're great it's not that melted butter is bad but if your recipe says to use softened butter and you put your butter in the microwave to get it soft that is not the same thing and that's why your cookies don't turn out as good as the picture or as good as that one time that you made them that you did actually have time to put them put the butter on the counter for 30 minutes beforehand okay if you here's what you need to do that your butter needs to be soft enough that like if you put your finger in it like you can see the indentation

but your finger doesn't drown in butter you know when you leave butter out to put on bread and it's been out for hours and it's like silky smooth and amazing and spreadable that's too soft for cookies the time the ideal time is to pull out your stick of butter about 30 minutes before you need to bake your cookies and that's pretty ideal now if you need to get a move on then here's what you do instead stay away from that microwave don't you open up that microwave what you do instead is the first thing pull out your butter however much you need cut it into cubes or just like slice it up and kind of spread the slices out on the butter paper that's a thing butter paper um and then gather up all your other ingredients and by the time you're ready by the time you've sifted your flour or

you know measured your sugar or whatever it is your butter's going to be fine it's not going to need as long You could do that anytime, but you might not have to. So if you need soft butter, quick, cut it into pieces, stay away from the microwave. Now here's why. The reason that now we're going to talk about sugars, because here's what happens with most cookies. We're talking like standard sort of like chocolate chip bakery kind of cookie situations. What happens is the sugar is sharp. Have you ever done a sugar mask?

It's like exfoliating, right? That stuff's got some edges. it. So when sugar goes into butter and it's whipped, it's creamed, right? You cream the butter and the sugar together first. What's happening is those sharp sugar crystals are cutting into that butter, right? And they're separating that butter and they're making it nice and fluffy. And they're like, hey, butter, let's like become friends. And the sugar starts to like break apart those pieces of butter and it's like sugar crystals get all throughout that butter and make it nice and fluffy and awesome. But if your butter is too hard, if it's straight out of the fridge and you try to do that,

your sugar's like, what's happening? And it's like bouncing around and it has nowhere to go and it's trying to cut into this hard butter and the butter's like, nope, not happening. And you can't understand why your mixer's going to die and your cookies are weird. If your butter is too soft, then the sugar has no resistance and it just kind of like melts together and it doesn't get fluffy because the sugar has nothing to cut into. It's like, oh, we're here, oh, we're here already. Oh, okay cool and then everything sort of calms down my butter and sugar have personalities i don't i don't know how boring your kitchen is but mine totally have like parties and rays in the mixing bowl so the best combination of that sugar doing the right thing with the butter is for that butter to be just

soft enough that the sugar can cut into it without being too being too difficult to break into it or being so lazy that it doesn't even do anything 30 minutes is ideal okay now when it comes to sugar and You're choosing your sugars or you're following your recipe. If you look at a recipe and you're like, how are these going to turn out? White sugar gives a lot of structure to your cookies. So if you are doing, if you see a recipe and it has all regular white granulated sugar, think about like sugar cookies, obviously, but they're like pale, right? They're white or shortbread uses only sugar.

it's going to have a really nice structure, kind of some sturdiness to it, but it's just going to kind of just taste sweet. There's not a whole lot of nuance in cookies that just have white sugar unless you've got lots of other flavorings. But in terms of how the sweetness comes through, it's just sort of one note, sweet. And it's fine. Sometimes that's great. If you want to just eat a really good short bread, it's just butter and flour and sugar. And some people don't say salt. It requires salt. We'll get to that.

It's fine. but brown sugar makes your cookies a little bit softer because brown sugar is basically not basically it is white sugar and molasses that's all it is so if you think about it you're adding a little bit of like you know liquid like smooth liquid into your sugar and so it's going to make it softer so your cookies therefore are going to be a little bit softer they're also going to be so much richer in their flavor there's going to be a deeper flavor to that So if you are into experimenting with baking recipes, you don't want to change your ratios very much unless you really know what you're doing. But if you try a cookie recipe and you're like, this is good.

But I think I would like to see if I can make it even better. Just equally substitute some of the white sugar for some brown sugar. So if your recipe calls for a cup of granulated sugar and half a cup of brown sugar, do three quarters of a cup of white sugar. do three quarters of a cup of white sugar and three quarters of brown or even if you're going crazy switch it completely half a cup of granulated and one full cup of brown it's still a total of one and a half cups of sugar but change your ratio a little bit and see what happens those are fun experiments to do i think at least because you can just sort of see the difference that one tiny change can pretty drastically make in your cookie and it might change it will change the texture

and the flavor and it might actually change it to the kind of cookie that you prefer to the first one. So there's a little talk about sugars. We could talk about honey and agave and coconut sugar and all of those things. That's fine. But we're not going to because most of the time when we're talking cookies, like trying to use better ingredients doesn't matter so much. That's not my goal when I'm making cookies. That's for like salad. So you can, we'll talk about that another time.

about our alternative ingredients another time. Okay, now we're going to talk about salt. I want you guys to listen to me very carefully. I get really passionate about salt in anything. Salt does not make things salty. Salt makes things better. Okay? And that's just not me trying to like give you guys high blood pressure. Salt makes everything taste more like itself. It elevates everything. It rounds everything out. If you make a cookie, without salt in it. And then you taste the same recipe and it does have salt in it or enough salt at least because I think most cookie recipes don't have enough salt in them.

It is a world of difference. Now, my stepdad does not like salt in his cookies. And that's okay. Some people don't really enjoy having that kind of like more complex flavor or having things sort of like sing and pop and you're like, ooh, that was. That was the bite of salt. That's crazy. This is a cookie.

Like some people, you just want, like, your regular cookie that you've been eating for a really long time. And there's nothing wrong with that. Like, that's totally fine. Don't, if you put salt in your cookies and you don't like it, then don't do it anymore. You know what man? Like, do your own thing. Cookies need to be enjoyed in the way that you enjoy them the most.

And if that does not include salt, then by all means, don't include it. But if you make cookies and you're like, yeah, these are good. Most of the time, you just need a little bit of salt for you to be like, oh these are so good like that is the tiny adjustment that salt will do to you so my kind of general rule of thumb when I'm looking at other people's cookie recipes is there needs to be at least one teaspoon of salt per two cups of flour well I guess that would be a half a teaspoon of salt per cup of flour at least if there's not those cookies aren't all taste very good or they're not going to taste as good as they could okay so if you are

You can make that adjustment. If you're making a cookie recipe and you're like, man, it says a quarter teaspoon of salt and there's two and a half cups of flour in this. Kendra told me that that's not enough. I'm going to do a teaspoon. Maybe you've been a teaspoon and a half. Oh my goodness. Of salt in these cookies and see what happens. Now, I use kosher salt just because that's what I like.

I cook with it and I bake with it. I don't have any other salts in my house. And I know that there are a lot of recipes that like sprinkle flaked salt. or sea salt on top of things, so you get kind of like a bite of salt. I want every bite to taste equally good. I don't want there to be like a bite that is so much better because of a bite of salt. So I personally am not a salt on top sprinkler baker. I put my salt inside. That's just me. But that's why people actually do that. They add salt because there's usually not enough in the recipe. So they have to put it on top and make it like, oh, these are so amazing. So for me,

a genius way of being lazy about cooking and not having to do another step is to just put all the salt in the actual cookie dough. So please don't skip the salt. Okay, let's talk about mixing. We already did a little bit when I told you about the butter and the sugar, creaming the butter and the sugar. Usually, this is just a general rule. Not if your instructions for cookies are different, then they're different for a reason. But in general, when you cream butter and sugar, that's the first step of cookies to get that fluffiness, right? You need to do it for a couple of minutes. And you might want to time yourself the first time you actually pay attention to this because you'll be surprised at how long two minutes is. Some recipes actually say cream it for three to five. And I'm like, oh, I mean,

that makes me nervous and I've been making cookies for a long time and love it. So, but you need to cream it for a couple minutes. You do. And time it the first time is just a see. And actually, actually watch what happens. Watch what happens to the butter and the sugar the more time that goes on. And we're talking like solid medium speed, right? It transforms. You actually watch it transform. Like it comes together. And a lot of times when I first started making cookies, like once the butter and the sugar just came together and turned into one thing, I was like, oh, I'm done. No, you're not. It's not fluffy yet. And the longer it goes, you're going to see it start to expand and get lighter in color. You're like, what is happening? It was like this kind of like brownish yellow tan mess.

And now it's this lovely, beautiful like daffalil yellow. So you have to give it some time and watch it and see that transformation and see what happens. And it's great. Now I have when I mix, when I use my kitchen aid, I have a kitchen a day that I love, I have a paddle, a mixing paddle that has a spatula on one side. and it's magical. I love it so very much because I don't have to scrape down the sides of the bowl

very often, if at all, depending on what the recipe is. I will put a link to that paddle so you can see what I'm talking about in the show notes if you want to get one for your kitchen aid. The show notes for this episode are the lazy geniuscollective.com

slash lazy slash, I guess, cookies. So you can go and see that paddle that I'm talking about. But if you don't have a paddle like that or you're using a hand mixer, after you cream the butter and sugar you definitely want to scrape down the size and the bottom of the bowl and you'll see you might see a tiny color difference in the butter and the sugar that got pushed up against the bowl

and wasn't part of that two minute mixing it didn't get as fluffy so give it another little juz if you see a difference of color when you scoop I mean when you scrape um definitely give it another mix okay now usually the next step is adding eggs I really like to add add an extra yolk to a lot of my any baking recipe cookies and cakes too i love to add an extra yoke because it just makes it richer and it binds it together a little bit more without making it flowery things that bind cookies together are flour and egg generally and if you add more flour flour doesn't have any flavor right and it changes the texture as well in not a great way if you just add more flour to bring it together it's not going to it's not going to do anything it's not going to

cookie better. But if you add an egg yolk, then it does bring it together, but it also adds more fat, it adds more flavor, it adds more structure. I love to add an egg yolk, not a full egg, it's just the yolk. But when you add your eggs, I know a lot of cookies say just add your eggs, but you've worked so hard to fluff up this butter and the sugar, and there's a lot of liquid in butter. If you try to add, and you've already worked to like keep the liquid and the fat and that butter together, you know, so it's not curdling. If you add all of your eggs at once and you start to mix, there's a chance that your mixture will curdle. And it gets that kind of lumpy like buttermilk looking thing where everything's starting to separate because you added that

liquid from the, you didn't give the liquid from the egg enough of a chance to mix in with the butter and become one homogenous thing. Okay. So the way that you avoid that is just add one egg at a time. Add one egg. Mix it until you don't see any yellow. Add another egg. Just do it gradually and it will make a huge difference. Now if you start to see that there is a chance, this is when you're baking in anything, if you start to see like, oh, I think this is going to curdle. I think this is about to curl. Add a spoonful of flour. It's all going to end up in the same place anyway. Add a spoonful of flour to kind of like soak up that liquid a little bit and adjust the balance so that it doesn't curdle. It's not going to hurt anything.

Aw isn't something we need to travel for. It's something waiting for us in everyday life, whether in a city street or a moment with a work of art. I'm Dr. Keltner, host of the Science of Happiness podcast. Join me for Cities of Aw, a special series on how our public spaces can spark awe, wonder, and enhance the quality of public life. You can find us wherever you listen to your podcasts. So add your eggs one at a time. And your vanilla. I usually add a little more vanilla than it's called for to. I think the vanilla and salt are woefully underused in cookies. And so I definitely give them top billing. So this is when you add your vanilla. And then when you add your flour that you've already mixed together with your salt, amen. And then you're baking soda, probably, because baking soda. No, wait. No, wait a minute. Okay. You want to know the difference between baking soda and baking powder? Sometimes it can be, this is why a lot of people don't bake because you're like, I don't know the answers

of these questions, but let me explain this to you. Okay. Baking soda requires an acid. It is an alkali. This is the only thing about science I know. Baking soda is an alkali and it needs an acid to create gas, to create a chemical reaction that creates gas that makes food rise up that makes your cookies puff up and spread. Okay. Now, a lot of cookie recipes will use the acid in the molasses because it's acidic. Isn't that weird? But the molasses in brown sugar will react with the baking soda. Now, if there is no brown sugar, then you're probably going to need to use baking powder. Or you could use a little bit of powder and soda. But powder, baking powder, actually has the acid and the alkali in the same container. and it just has another like product, I don't know what to call it, that there's something else in there that separates the two so that doesn't have a reaction inside the jar and then nothing happens when you put it inside your baked goods.

Okay, so that's, you'll see on the jars of a lot of baking powder. It'll say double-acting baking powder. What that means is they're, the initial reaction of like gas starting to happen and those, the alkali and the acid coming together happens when liquid, hits the baking powder. That's the first reaction and bubbles start to form. So you don't want to make a batter with baking powder and just let it sit at room temperature or something because then a lot of that reaction will kind of start to fade, right? And then the second time that it acts that the reaction happens is when it hits heat. So water and heat. So when you put it in the oven, then it starts to rise

again. Okay, so that's kind of the difference in soda and powder. Baking soda, needs an acid to react like buttermilk and a cake or something like that baking powder doesn't it it already has it in there um yeah it already has it in there okay so you're going to add your dry ingredients to your cookie batter and you're going to mix it in just until it's combined if you're adding any sort of nuts or chocolate chips or something like that add those in when you still see some streaks of flour but so you don't overmix your cookies so you don't um develop the gluten in the flour too much. When gluten is developed, that's when things get tough. And that's great for bread, man. You don't want like soft, nasty bread. You want bread with like umph and structure and chew.

You don't want to chew in your cookies. You know, you don't want to have to like work hard to chew your cookies or your cake or your, you know, muffins or cupcakes or whatever. So if you're, when you're mixing in flour, when you're baking, please make sure that you mix it just until you can't seek any more flour. Don't beat it. and like walk away and change the laundry like no no no no no no just needs to barely disappear and then you stop okay all right so now let's do to finish up the baking section really fast talked a lot about cookies let's talk about scooping i use a food scoop i'll link to this in the show notes too i use a food scoop to scoop out my cookies so that they're all the same size and then i chill

them. I chill the dough. I scoop it while it's still like room temperature, like when I just finished it. And then I scoop them out onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper so that I don't have to wash a pan. And they're really close together. Like I don't put the cookie dough balls on the cookie sheet spread out like I would if they were directly going into the oven because they're not. They're going into the fridge. My cookie dough, do you know how long I keep that mess on the fridge? Like two full days. Like 48 to 72 hours. And it could, oh, a good. A good. A good. because the flavors like marry so much and everything just gets really mellow and the flour gets really hydrated and there are all these crazy sciencey things that are happening in the background

and it makes your cookies super tasty but you don't have to do for 72 hours like that's insane but what you can do please do it for at least maybe just 30 minutes just firm them up a little bit because when they go into your oven they're going to respond better by not being at room temperature. They won't spread as much because the butter has a little further to go. You know, it's kind of firmed up. So it needs a little bit more coaxing to melt because it has a longer to go to spread versus if it was just room temperature. So try to chill that cookie dough for 30 minutes if you can, up to 72 hours. When you bake your cookies, we're going to talk about temperature really quickly. When you bake your cookies, when you put it in a hot oven, say like,

400, anywhere from 375 to 425, the outside edges are going to cook faster than the inside, right? So what that's going to mean for your cookie, and sometimes this is what you want. What this is going to mean for your cookie is the edges set quickly and they might get a little crusty while the inside stays kind of gooey and maybe even tall, okay? The higher temperature, the higher the temperature that you bake your cookies, probably the less they're going to spread because you set the outside quicker. Now, if your time, your temperature is 375 and below, like 325 to 375, it's going to be a gentle spread. And the cookie is going to be about all the same color, right? The middle and the outside are going to be the same color. So just think about

what you want out of your cookie. You could even do, you could test in the same batch, you know, like knock your oven up to 400, put in a couple and see what happens, bring it down to 350. do a couple and see what happens and you may discover a way that you want to eat your cookies that you didn't know about before so that's just a little word on temperature okay we're going to zoom through the last couple of things because they're pretty quick and practical can we talk about cleaning up after you bake your cookies or how you can even go about the process so that your cleanup is easy because isn't that the worst part about it all here are a couple things you can do rachel ray taught us to have a garbage bowl right if you ever watched 30 minute meals i do that you do that

this for baking, but I put a plastic bag, like a grocery bag, inside a bowl so that I don't have to wash the ball. That goes my butter paper, my eggs, all that stuff. If you wear an apron, makes a big difference, or at least put like a kitchen towel over your shoulder, or when you get a little egg white on your finger, or you spill vanilla, when you put the cat back on, you know, it's just nice to not be running around to get a towel. You just wipe your hands on something very quickly. I put a dinner plate out. If I'm really lazy, I put an actual napkin or paper towel on top of said dinner plate so the dinner plate doesn't get messy. That is where all my measuring utensils go. So I use my teaspoon to measure my salt and my baking powder and I'm going to need it later to

measure my vanilla. But if I put it down on the counter, one, it kind of gets lost in the shuffle. And two, now I've got like all these little flower bits all over the counter. Or if I measure the vanilla and then I've got vanilla puddles all over the counter. So all of my measuring utensils go on a plate when they're used and not used. That's just where they all go. Another thing is if you are making something that is sticky, you know, if your batter gets sticky or it gets on the counter or even when you scoop out all of your dough, rinse out stuff that's sticky. Go ahead and rinse it out. You can wash it in a minute, but rinse it out to make washing so much easier later. And finally, parchment paper. parchment paper parchment paper put parchment paper on your cookie sheet please please for the love i think i

actually wrote a post about this a while ago i'll link to it in the show notes um but if you put parchment paper down on your cookie sheet put your cookies on it you bake them then when you're done with them you slide the parchment paper from the cookie sheet onto your cooling rack you don't have to clean your cookie sheet you also don't have to clean your cooling rack and you can reuse the parchment paper Or did you know that? You can wipe it down with the paper towel if you want if it's like a terribly gooey batch of cookies. But you can reuse that parchment paper several times until it kind of turns brown. And you're like, no, I don't think I want to do this anymore.

Just fold it up like in half so that the sides that were exposed to the cookies are now touching each other and then roll it up. And it's so great. So there's some good cleaning tips for you. Okay. How do you store cookies so you don't eat them? all at once, right? Those little dough balls that we put into the fridge to chill, now they're nice and hard, pop them into a big freezer bag, label it and put it in the freezer. I promise you need to label it. You're going to be like, oh yeah, I know what kind of cookie that is. But if you

start getting into the habit of putting cookie dough, which you should get into this habit of putting cookie dough in the freezer, you're not going to be able to differentiate. So go ahead and label it. You can even say how many there are, you can say, which is a little bit annoying, but if you're like, I need 36 cookies for my kids class you don't have to count you know the number is right there you also can save yourself the time of having to look up the temperature and time baking time by writing it on the bag you know these are chocolate chip cookies 375 12 minutes write it on the bag and then done all right and when you bake your cookies how do you store baked cookies other than in your mouth I have a cookie jar.

It's a little blue owl. His name's Owley. His name's Mohamed Owley. I love him. That's where our cookies go. But you just want to make sure they're airtight. So whether that's in Tupperware or on a plate that you put plastic around, just make sure that it's airtight so that your cookies don't get hard.

I mean, really, you want to keep them nice and soft. But don't put them in the refrigerator. Don't put them in the refrigerator. That changes your cookies tremendously. And it doesn't extend the shelf life. very much and it's just kind of a bummer. So keep them on your counter in a cookie jar. Okay. And finally, eating. We've done baking. We've done cleaning. We've done storing. Now I want to give you a quick eating tip of cookies. Okay, ready? I read about this, I think on

the kitchen.com, which if you follow me on Instagram at The Lazy Genius, you might have seen a story in the last few weeks about I talked about the kitchen being my favorite online source when it comes to anything food. If I Google a question about food and the kitchen has an answer, I always, always, always read them. I don't read anyone else because their answers are always excellent. They have never steered me wrong. Everything I've tried from them has been fantastic. And they did a blog post one time about making the perfect ice cream sandwiches. And it blew my mind. And I'll find it and link to it. But basically what they say is what we think about what we think we think we should do when it comes to making ice cream sandwiches is you want to freeze your cookies so that

they're hard right um and then you put like soft ice cream on them so that it's easy to kind of shape but ice cream sandwiches made with homemade cookies are a delight but they're kind they're super messy and they're hard to eat you need to be accept that as part of the deal but the kitchen changed everything they're like no no no no you don't get you don't get cold cookies and room and not room to have ice cream that's gross. You don't get cold cookies and like kind of melt the ice cream. No, no. You take those cookies when they're out of the oven, warm cookies and super cold ice cream that you just pulled out of the freezer and scoop them together and the heat from the cookie starts to melt the ice cream. And then and the cold ice cream obviously starts to chill down the cookies. And what happens is they

meet in the same temperature. They meet in the middle. Rather than starting from like super far extremes and then becoming more extreme, like cold cookie. A cold cookie is not going to get hotter, right? Melty ice cream is not going to get colder. But if you have a hot cookie and super cold ice cream, the ice cream will start to melt. The cookie will start to firm up. Oh my word. And it's the perfect ice cream sandwich situation. So that is how I suggest you eat said cookies other than just like directly into your mouth. If you want to go crazy out of the oven, oh my word. Throw some ice cream on there and have fun. Okay, there's a lot of information about cookies, but I'm going to give you one more thing.

This is a lazy genius tip of the week. This is how you can be a genius, not just about cookies, but about desserts in general. I want to encourage you to get in the habit of freezing desserts. When we make a dessert recipe, almost always it is way more than we need. Okay. You can freeze so many things. So you can freeze those cookie dough balls and you can bake as, you know, you can bake one at a time. when you bake brownies or blondies or some sort of bar type thing you can bake uh freeze those baked just wrap them up in plastic cut them into their squares wrap them up in plastic put each individual one into a freezer bag and you've got brownies at the ready pop that puppy in the microwave for a few seconds put some ice cream on top of it all-a-mode baby brownie all-in-mode i mean come on now so i have

layer cakes like if i make a cake and i only need two layers i'll still bake three and I'll wrap up one layer and stick it in the freezer. So you can have like a quick cake, you know, like you can just put cool whip on top of it or make a quick buttercream or buy a can of frosting or you can crumble up the cake to make a trifle with chocolate pudding and cool whip. Like I always make save the extra and sometimes on purpose make extra desserts and put them in the freezer because then what happens like happened to me a couple weeks ago, I was, I asked if I could bring dessert for our church community group.

It's a bunch of people. It's like 20, 25 people. And we have dinner together every Sunday night. And I was like, can I bring dessert? And I went into my freezer. And I was able to bring, I think, six different kinds of cookies because I had six different kinds of cookie dough in my freezer. And somebody, there was something for everybody. You know, it was a fun variety. And I didn't have to bake. I didn't have to be baking in my kitchen all day long, right? I just baked like four or five of each kind and put them in a box. It was great. So it's such a fun. thing to get in the habit of doing. You can be a genius about dessert if you always have something kind of at the ready. And if you're already baking, just make a little extra or just don't eat them all

at one time. Just don't eat them all. Just put some in the freezer. And it is such a fun thing to know that you always have a delicious dessert ready for you in the freezer. Okay. I am out of breath. My throat is starting to hurt because I didn't know this. But when I talk about cookies, I did know this. When I talk about cookies, I just get super passionate. I love cookies. And I hope that there is even just one thing that I said today that is going to make your cookie baking experience even better. And if there is, tell me about it. You can email me, Kendra at the lazy geniuscollective.com, or you can tell me on Instagram at the lazy genius or on Twitter at lazy lazy genius. But I would love for you to connect with me and tell me your own cookie tips.

You can also just leave a comment on the show notes for this episode, the lazygeenies.com slash lazy slash cookies. And head there to get the, you can get a link to that spatula thing I talked about, to the cookie scoop that I love to use. And I'm also going to link to some of my favorite cookie recipes that I use from other people and then some that are already on the Lazy Genius Collective blog.

So go check that out. Okay. Thank you for listening to 30 minutes of cookies talk. This is so much fun. And I look forward to seeing you next time. And until then, remember be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. See you next time. Have you ever felt like you were living just a B or B plus life?

It's so dangerous to live that. More dangerous than a B minus or a C plus life? Because when you're living a B or B plus life, you don't change it. You think it's good enough. Is it? I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast called Becoming You. People think, okay, an A plus life is not available to me, but there is a way.

We are all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts.