Vegan Cookie Masterclass: Learn the Skills to Master Dairy Free Recipes

1. Introduction: You don't need dairy or eggs to bake good cookies. What you do need is a core understanding of how ingredients work together in a recipe, how temperature affects each of those ingredients, and how time is the single most important factor in baking really good cookies. In this course, you can learn the foundational skills to master vegan cookie recipes from simple to complex. I want to show you that plant-based baking does not mean you are sacrificing flavor. If you are new to vegan cookie baking and have no idea where to start, or even if you've been dairy free for a long time, this course has something for everybody. You can learn how to take a favorite recipe and turn it into a vegan recipe. I'll teach you about the substitutions that work best for cookies and the way that those ingredients work to get you the result that you want. This course also has an abundance of cookie techniques so that you won't shy away from any cookie project in the future. You can learn roll-out cookies and glazing, how to make fudge brownies, building decadent sandwich cookies and more. You can feel confident that enrolling in this course will give you plenty of knowledge that's not only used widely in home-baking, but also in professional, commercial baking businesses. I've taken years of experience and packed it into the lessons in this course so that you have a good place to start. There are plenty of supplements, worksheets and recipes that you will gain access to that you can download and print and have ready in your own kitchen. You also have the ability to ask me questions related to the course and get the guidance that you need. I hope to see you in the course. 2. Equipment : In order to make good cookies, you need some basic kitchen equipment. Now, I've included a list of everything that I use throughout the course attached to this lesson. By no means do you need to feel like you have to run out and buy all of these things. You definitely do not. A lot of the equipments, you can use supplements, things that you already have at home; or come up with creative new ways to do things. I mentioned a lot throughout the lessons different ideas of tools that you might already have at home. One good thing to keep in mind is that whatever you use, if it's not built specifically for food, please give it a good wash. You don't ever want to take something from somewhere random in your house and just use it with food. Make sure that you can clean it properly and that it's going to be okay coming into contact with any type of food surface. If you have any questions, if there's something that you don't have access to, whether it be a tool or an ingredient, please send me a message and I'll see if I can't troubleshoot somehow and we can come up with something so that you can practice all the recipes in the course. 3. Substitutions : I get asked a lot about substitutions for dairy and eggs in cookie recipes. I wanted to include a really good handout that you can print and keep for yourself that explains the different types of substitutions to use, in what quantities, and how they work. The biggest thing to understand was substitutions. A lot of the time, there's this expectation that if you replace eggs with a non-dairy ingredient, that it's going to be the exact same outcome. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. Now with cookies, it's a lot easier to get similar outcomes because we're dealing with smaller volumes of ingredients, smaller volume of the final baked product, and less baking time. But eggs are only eggs. Nothing else can be an egg. Whole milk is only whole milk. Nothing else can be whole milk. It's important to understand that baking is science, its chemistry. These amazing chemical reactions are happening when you're dealing with time and temperature. If you're trying to replace an ingredient with something else and you're expecting this exact same results, it's time to consider some other options. Now, the substitutions that I've included with the course are really great to get similar results. But a lot of the time, I like to play around with maybe other ingredients to get the outcome that I'm looking for. That's something to keep in mind and we'll talk about different ingredients later on in this section. In the meantime, check out that handout and if you have any questions, go ahead and send me a message. 4. No-Bake: Marshmallow Cereal Treats : In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to make some crispy cereal treats. These are made so simply with any cereal that you like, depending on what you and your family prefer. I'm going to be showing you with just some Cheerios, you can use Fruity Pebbles or Cocoa Pebbles, really anything that you like, that fits into your dietary needs. We're going to be using some Dandies Vegan Marshmallows. If you have a hard time getting a hold of these, if you can't find them in your local store, try ordering them online. Dandies is a really nice alternative to regular marshmallows, which have gelatin in them, which, of course, is not vegan friendly. Let's jump into the lesson. The first thing we want to do is prepare our pan. I'm choosing an eight-inch by eight-inch square baking dish, you can use a larger pan, you can multiply this recipe. The recipe included with the course is enough to fill the eight by eight pan, you can also double it and get thicker bars, that's totally up to you. If you were looking to fill a nine by 13 pan, you'd probably want to do a double batch for thin bars and then a quadruple batch or a four times for thick bars to fill a nine by 13 pan. I already have my pan out and I'm just coating it in some palm shortening. You can use any vegetable shortening or diet-friendly pan spray. You don't need parchment paper or anything like that, we just want to give the pan a nice little coating so that our treats just pop out easily because we've got that marshmallow in there. I'm also coating my mixing bowl with shortening as well, and the purpose of this is that once that marshmallow is melted down, it can get really sticky, so we just want to make sure that it doesn't stick. Now, if your saucepan is large enough to make the entire batch in, then you can go ahead and omit this step, but if you're going to be making larger batches, then you want to coat your mixing bowl. Next, we're just going to go ahead and get our marshmallows and shortening. I'm using a vegan butter alternative, and the reason I'm not using vegetable shortening in this part is because the vegan buttery spread has different flavored oils in it that just give it more of a butter flavor, which is a little bit nicer because it's going to be raw in these bars. So I'm using that. I want to get that in the pan with my marshmallows. I'm just using a wooden spoon, but you can use any type of spatula, plastic spatula, I just wouldn't use metal to mix up my marshmallows because it's going to get really sticky. We want to put this on medium heat and hang out with it, these marshmallows take a little bit of time to melt down just because of the type of setting agent that's used in it, which is agar-agar, which has a higher melting point. We're going to melt those down, and it's going to look clumpy or like a big ball of marshmallow once it all comes together, but don't worry, that's how it looks. But when you can pick it up with your spoon and it starts to fall off the spoon and pull apart, that's what we're looking for because then we know it's warm enough to be able to mix it in with the cereal. Once it has reached that temperature and that consistency, it's going to come really easy right out of your pan because you have the vegan butter in there, which is made with oils as opposed to butterfat, which has water content in it. We're going to go ahead and get that into our mixing bowl. You want to immediately and working quickly, get your cereal right into the bowl, and you want to mix it as quickly as possible. It's a little tricky, especially, if you're using bigger batches. If you have gloves, this is a good time, you can put on a couple pairs of gloves and use your hands. But, please, it's hot, so just don't burn yourself. But if you can do it with a spoon, then great; I'm using wooden spoon, and I do take a moment to coat my spoon in palm shortening just so that everything is not sticking to my spoon too much. Usually, as you're mixing this and getting it all together and coating all this cereal, the marshmallow is cooling down, so by the time that you're ready to transfer it to the pan, it should be cool enough to be able to push down into the pan to make sure that the bars come together and they're going to have a good structure. Once you get it into the pan, you just want to spread it out as well as you can. I'm going to go ahead and cover my hands with a little bit of that palm shortening just to keep my hands from sticking to all of the marshmallow, and that's going to help me push it out into the corners of the pan and just get it nice and packed down in there. You want to press firmly so that the bars aren't falling apart, you want everything to be stuck together really well. The last thing that I'm doing, and this is just what I love in my household and I personally love this myself, I'm just taking some organic peanut butter and spreading it over the top. I do this before it cools down because the peanut butter gets a little bit melty and seeps down into the cereal treats, and it is so delicious. This is totally optional, you don't have to do this. Then I'm taking some vegan dairy-free chocolate chips, mini chocolate chips and sprinkling it on top, and they also get a little bit melty and it's just so so yummy. Again, you can use any kind of cereal you want for this, you can cut the treats, dip them in chocolate, you can drizzle them with like, if you find some vegan white chocolate, you can add dried fruits, you can add more mini marshmallows that aren't melted, you can add chocolate chips in with the treats, you just want to substitute out however much other ingredient you want to use of cereal. Say you want to add in half a cup of dried cranberries, take out half a cup of your cereal from the recipe, put in the cranberries, it's really that simple, and then everything else would stay the same. To cut these, you just want to make sure that they cool completely before you try to cut them, so then the marshmallow has a chance to set-up and they're not falling apart. This recipe made about nine treats. Obviously, if you want to double up the recipe, you're going to get more treats, twice as many. They're super simple to cut, you just want to have a nice sharp knife. You can also tip these out of the pan, they should just slide right out the whole bar, and you can cut it on a cutting board, it's totally up to you. These keep for about 48 hours, if you just want to throw some plastic wrap over the top of your pan, keep it on your counter and enjoy, although they might not last that long. 5. Drop: Chocolate Chunk Cookies: Now, we're getting started into drop type cookies. In this section, we're going to take a look at a basic chocolate chunk recipe and then also a mocha chunk recipe. In this particular lesson, we'll get started with the chocolate chunk cookies. These cookies when cooled and ready to eat, have a nice soft center, crispy edges, and they're sweet and they balance out really nicely with the dark chocolate. If you don't have or are not able to get dark chocolate callets, that's okay, go ahead and use dark chocolate chips, anything that's dairy free. You can use vegan specific semi sweet baking chips, whatever you have access to. Let's get started. The first thing you want to do is get everything together. Means and plus all of your ingredients, have everything ready to go. If you're using a stand mixer, you're going to be wanting to use the paddle attachment. Then also prepare your cookie sheets with some non-stick baking paper or a non-stick baking mat and you can wait a little bit to preheat your oven. These cookies from start to finish take a little bit longer than it would take for your oven to preheat. But go ahead and get everything ready. First thing we're going to do is we're going to get our sugars, our shortening, baking soda, salt, vanilla, and applesauce into the bowl. We want to start that out on low speed just to get everything combined. This recipe is really nice because everything just goes in mostly at the beginning and you can mix it up, it comes together pretty quickly. Get those ingredients in there and also we are getting the salt and the baking soda and the vanilla in there in the beginning. That's really important. This is going to allow those ingredients to get evenly dispersed throughout our cookie dough. Typically, recipes call for the dry ingredients like the baking soda and salt to go in with the flour and then you would put that in in the end. But then what happens is they don't necessarily get evenly dispersed. So if you've ever taken a bite of a cookie and it had a little too much salt or you've made cookies in the past and some of them come out nice and perfect and then others are awkward and have weird pockets, that's why. We're going to prevent that by mixing all of those little extra ingredients in at the beginning. So get that going on low speed just to disperse it and then we're going to knock it up to medium speed and let that go for about two minutes. What we're looking to achieve is not necessarily adding a bunch of air because you don't want a bunch of air in your cookies. Cookies, typically, you want to be a little bit denser than say, a cake would be. What we're actually doing is making sure that we're breaking down the brown sugar because brown sugar is a coarser sugar, especially organic sugars, which you're going to be using if you're going specifically vegan. You want to make sure they have a little, a bit of extra time to break down so that they don't give you crunchy granular cookies in the end, because cookies don't take that long to bake. You want to mix those well, and then scrape your bowl, mix it again, then we're going to put in the flour at the end, all at once. Start it on low speed so your flour doesn't come up out of the bowl and then mix it at low speed until it's pretty well combined. Stop, scrape your bowl and then just bump it up to medium speed for a few seconds to get it fully incorporated and then stop. We just want to mix it well, but we don't want to over mix it. Cookies can get really tough and cakey if you over mix them, and we don't want cakey cookies, we want nice, soft, chewy cookies. Now, once you have your dough ready to go, this is when you can pop your oven on to 275 degrees Fahrenheit. This low temperature is really important. Cookies that bake at higher temperatures tend to get over baked or become tough. The reason is that the outside of the cookie will bake and caramelize, the sugars will caramelize really fast before the center of the cookie has enough time to fully bake. What happens then is as you're waiting for the center to bake, the outside becomes just overdone and we don't want that. We want nice uniform cookies. So baking them at a lower temperature for a little bit longer is helping us achieve that end. So go ahead. I'm using a number 50 scoop. I really recommend getting a cookie scoop for your cookies so that they all come out nice and even every time. Two scoops for large cookies, I'm just skipping two number 50s and then I'm rolling them together. Perfect. Now, once you get these scooped out rolled together and placed, you can flatten them a little bit, and this is where I'm putting my chocolate on top. Now if you're not using the callets or if you want to add the chocolate into the cookie, go ahead. After you finish your dough, you can just fold your chocolate as much as you like into the cookies and then scoop and bake from there. But the way I'm doing it, it just gives you more of a refined looking cookie and I also like to know where my chocolate is in every bite. There's no surprises. So I'm using a 74 percent organic dark chocolate and this has no dairy in it. But again, if you are looking for these to be completely dairy free because of an allergy, you want to get dairy free specific chocolate. Don't ever just assume that because the label doesn't say milk on it, that it's actually dairy free. It could still be processed in a facility that processes dairy. Now, for vegan purposes, just as long as it doesn't contain dairy, you're good to go. I'm breaking up two callets per large cookie. If you're doing a smaller cookie, I just use one callet, but you can add as much as you'd like. If you want more chocolate, I'd just like to balance it out. You're primarily using brown sugar and that's really what makes chocolate chip cookies so awesome, because if you use white sugar primarily in the cookie, the flavors will still be good, but not as good. The molasses in the brown sugar gives you those deep caramelized notes that go really well with dark chocolate. I personally think that brown sugar is essential for chocolate chip cookies. You cannot omit that at all. Now, if you can't find light brown sugar, you could also use dark brown sugar. It's just going to be more of an intense flavor and your cookies are going to look darker when they're finished baking. You want to get those into the oven if your oven is well calibrated, then the time is listed on the recipe, will work perfectly. You have a two minute window with cookies. So you'll make sure you stay within that two minute window. When they're done baking, what you're looking for is that the center of the cookie has just, barely lost its shine. You're not going to see very much color because again, we're baking in a lower temperature. So we're not going to get a lot of browning on the outside by the time the center is cooked. Now if you try to press on the cookie and it seems soft in the center with cookies, it's really hard to do that test really what I'm looking for when I look in a cookie, is I'm looking right in the very center of the cookie. If the very center of the cookie looks slightly dulled, like the edges of the cookie, then I know it's done. If it looks a little bit shiny, a layer could be a little bit wet right in the center. It's not quite done, give it another 30 seconds to one minute, and then check them again and remove them from the oven. The key with really good drop cookies is getting them right at that point where the center goes from shiny to dull and then you take them out. Because once you take these cookies out, they're going to continue to bake as they cool and you don't want to worry too much and over bake them. Another nice thing to do is bake a couple cookies on a sheet by themselves, set the rest of your dough aside, bake them, and time it and take them out, let them cool and check them. You can put your cookie dough in the refrigerator, it'll be just fine. It won't hurt it. You can check those cookies, if they're perfectly baked, then go ahead and bake off the rest of your dough and make a note for the exact amount of time that particular recipe takes in your oven. That's really the key to getting successful cookies, is making sure you find the time that works best for your oven. Once these are nice and baked, you want to let them cool completely. Now, with vegan cookies because we're not using egg, egg has protein in it, which works better at giving more structure, but we're using applesauce. So if you try to handle these cookies before they're completely cool, they're going to be really difficult to handle, they might break. I like to cool them completely on my sheet tray before I handle them and I also like to cool them completely then put them in an airtight container and let them sit overnight. I like to bake these a night before and let them sit overnight, the next morning, they age a little bit and it's really important, especially for drop cookies because then it gives the ingredients a chance to come to room temperature and all the flavors to meld together. The flavors marry, but also room temperature foods have better flavor than hot foods. You might like hot chocolate chip cookies, and that's totally fine but these cookies, drop style cookies typically are at their best the following day as long as you kept them nice and sealed and not exposed to the open air. These cookies, once they are cool, will keep in an airtight container for up to three days. Now, if you want to make your dough and portion it out and freeze it, you can do that and then bake them off anytime you want and you can do that with any cookie dough, which is what I really love about preparing large amounts of cookies, is you can make your dough, portion it, freeze the dough and then bake it off as you need it. 6. Drop: Match Chunk Cookies: Welcome to another lesson. In this one, we're going to be taking a look at another drop-type cookie, except we're using matcha, which is a fun new ingredient. Now matcha is just young, green tea leaves ground down into a powder. You can add it to any of your baked goods, you can add it to drinks. You can really have fun with it, and it gives you that really intense green tea flavor. There is one caveat to getting matcha powder. Now I personally only purchase TEAki Hut, and the reason is that some matcha powders tend to have a bitter flavor. That's just part of the type of tea leaf and how old it is when they process it, and how they process it. But TEAki Hut, every time I get a bag of matcha from them, it's really good and definitely not bitter. If you're not sure what brand to get started with, definitely check that one out, but if you already have a brand that you love to use, go ahead and use that one. Now, we're going to get started. Of course, everything is mise en place, and I have my stand mixer bowl ready to go. All of my dry ingredients, except for the flour, are going to go in at this point, including the matcha powder, and then that's going to allow the matcha powder to get really nice and uniformly mixed into the cookies. Also, we are going to be adding the shortening of applesauce. I'm going to go ahead and turn this on to medium speed and get it nice and combined, and cream together. I'd give it two minutes. I'd just pop it onto medium speed and walk away and do a couple of other things and then come back. Once that's ready to go, go ahead and scrape the bowl really well. It is so important to scrape your bowl when you're making cookies. If you've ever had cookie blow outs, that's what I call them, or the cookie, there's pockets where it melts or gets too dry or it's just odd. It's because you're not thoroughly mixing your cookie dough. You make sure to scrape the bowl really well, give it another little pulse, and then in goes the flour, and that can go in all at once. We're going to start that on low speed and then get it up to medium speed, really quick, just to get it all nice and mixed together. Now again, I am using my number 50 cookie scoop. This is just my standard cookie scoop. I love it because you can use it for small cookies, you can use two scoops to make medium-sized cookies, or if you want to go really large, you can use three or even four of these scoops. It works really nice too to have the number 50 scoop, especially, if you don't have a melon baller, you can use it for watermelon, cantaloupe. It's generally all purpose. I use my cookie scoop for a lot of different things. But we're going to get the sheet pan ready, and the recipe included with the course is going to give you 12 large cookies, or 24 small cookies. If you're using one scoop, it's going to be 24, if you're using two scoops, it's going to be 12 cookies. We want to get these scooped out and onto our prepared sheet tray. This is also a good time to preheat your oven to 275 degrees Fahrenheit. Again, that low temperature is so important with drop cookies, because we're allowing the center of the cookie to bake before the outside of the cookie gets too dark or dried out. Now I'm also using, I found this really fun, vegan matcha white chocolate, and I just wanted to add it on top of my cookies, and this is totally optional. If you find some vegan white chocolate or dairy-free white chocolate. Even a dairy-free vegan semisweet chocolate would be good. I like the white chocolate because it keeps with the lighter tones, and it's just more visually pleasing. But I found this matcha white chocolate and it just goes so well with these cookies. I'm just chopping up a whole bar, and I found that one whole candy bar of this makes enough for one batch for very generously topped cookies, and of course, there's a little bit left for snacking, which is perfect. You want to go ahead and get that chopped up. As always, when you're chopping, use a cutting board, using a nice sharp chef's knife or even paring knife. But always use good knife skill practice and keep your fingers out of the way. You don't want to get any cuts on your fingers. I'm just using a rocking motion, back and forth on my cutting board across the chocolate, and I'm not going too vigorously because chocolate is slightly brittle when you're cutting it, and it tends to shoot off of your cutting board as you're cutting it, if you get a little too gung-ho. Just take your time, chop the chocolate, and I like to have a good mix of some big pieces, some little pieces. Then once my cookies are scooped, my chocolate is chopped, just sprinkling it on top. Then the cookies can go into the oven. The small ones are going to take about 11 minutes if your oven is well calibrated, about 15 minutes for the large cookies. What you're really looking for when they come out of the oven, is that the center of the cookie does not look wet or darker than the rest of the cookie. Once the top of the cookie looks uniform in color, they're ready to come out. Again, it's a very small window. You want to keep an eye on it. If your oven is well calibrated and you're making the large cookies, and you hit that 15 minute mark, you want to check it. If it looks a little wet in the center still, just give it one more minute and take it out, and it should be good to go. But you don't want to overbake it or overshoot, and be worried that it's going to be underbaked. Also, these don't contain any dairy, so if for any reason they would come out slightly underbaked, then you can still eat them. But then you know for the next time that maybe you need to add another minute onto your bake time. Once these come out, I would like to let them cool completely. I think these cookies taste much better if you let them age for a little bit. You let them sit for half a day or even if you make them the night before, and then let them cool on the counter, just until they're cool enough to get into an air-tight container, pop them in there, and then you can enjoy them the next morning with your tea or coffee, and they are so delicious. That's it for the matcha drop cookies. The recipe is linked to this lesson, so go ahead and you can download that and print it out and have it ready to go in your own kitchen. 7. Bars: Sweetened Condensed Coconut Milk: Now we reach the section on bars. We're going to start off this section with a coconut pecan bar. This bar uses obviously coconut pecans, chocolate, and a short bread crust. We're going to be making a vegan sweetened condensed milk. I'm using full fat, canned coconut milk. You want coconut milk that has the fat on top. That's really, really important. You don't want to use the carton coconut milk or coconut water. You definitely need some fat in there, so that it can condense down. This is essentially the same as taking full fat milk and condensing it down as you will with sweetened condensed milk. What we're going to be doing, is taking two cans of that coconut milk, putting them in a sauce pan and then we're going to add some brown sugar. The brown sugar is going to give it a nice color and a really nice rich flavor. What you want to do is combine those ingredients and get them onto the heat. I like to put mine on medium heat to get it up to a simmer and then put it down to low. Now it's going to simmer for a while, because we really want it to thicken up. Typically, about 35-40 minutes. It's definitely something that's good that you can kind of put on the back burner, so to speak, and do other things around the kitchen or around your house. But remember that it's there. You want to let that go and what you're really looking for is typically you'll see kind of a ring around in your pot where the liquid started. Now when you get down to about half and you're checking it and it's really nice and thick, that's when you want to take it off the heat. Now, I like to let mine cool. This is really great to do the day before because it is a little more time intensive. So I make mine the day before and then I just put it in a storage container that's going to have a lid on it and let it cool down at room temperature until it's no longer really hot or steaming. Then I put the lid on and pop it in the fridge and it's good to go for the next day when I'm ready to throw my bars together and bake it off. Now if you want to make this way ahead of time, it's good for about 3-4 days kept in the refrigerator. Because there is cream in this, you definitely want to keep it refrigerate it. Don't leave it out on the counter, it could spoil. 8. Bars: Short Crust : Let's take a look at the shortbread crust for our coconut pecan bars. Now this is a really easy shortbread crust. What I like about adding the crust to these bars is it gives it a little more stability, because there are so many fillings in it. It's a really thick bar. So we definitely want all of those toppings and fillings to hold together and we're giving it a little bit of help with that shortbread crust. Now this is very similar to like a pie crust or a shortbread cookie dough. We're going to be using the cut in method. We'll also be parbaking these. So when you want to do to get started is get a bowl out and get your dry ingredients into the bowl. So your flour, your sugar, and your salt. Now you do not need to use your electric mixer. You can do this totally by hand. That works. It's really simple. Sometimes I just made it with a wooden spoon, really easy to throw it together. So I get my dry ingredients in and I want to get those well incorporated so that I don't have any odd pockets of salt or sugar anywhere. Then my shortening is going to go in and this is the cutting in method. So you're just basically pushing the shortening into the dry ingredients. What this is going to do is give us nice flaky layers in our crust. So you want to get those mixed in there and it's okay if you still have some pieces of shortening that aren't completely broken down. You don't want this to be a paste by any means. So it's going to be a bit like a crumbly meal. Then you don't want any pieces of shortening their are larger than say, the size of a pea. So work it until you get to that point and then you can add in the rest of your ingredients, the wet ingredients. You want to mix it just until it comes together. So once your dough comes together, you have two options at this point. You can wrap it up and save it and make your crust at a later time. This crust actually will stay in the refrigerator for up to seven days before you bake it, or you can put it in the freezer for up to a month well wrapped. It's really nice for that. So what I like to do is on the same day that I make my sweetened condensed coconut milk, I also make my shortbread crust and parbake it. Now we have the following day, everything's nice and cool and ready to go. I can pour my bars together and get it into the oven. So what you want to do is you just one to press it into the bottom of your baking pan. I'm using an eight by eight inch standard square pan. This is a perfect recipe for that. If you want to go larger, spec of nine by 13 pan, you can just double the batch. You want to press it as evenly as possible into the bottom of the pan. The more even you get it, the nicer it's going to look when you cut into the bars. Once you get it nice and pressed into the pan, you can pop it into a 325-degree Fahrenheit oven. It's going to go for about 10-15 minutes. It's not going to take on a whole lot of color because the rest of the baking is going to happen when we put the toppings and the sweetened condensed coconut milk in there, but we want to give it a little bit of help just because the coconut milk is going to have a lot of moisture in it still. So we don't want a soggy crust when we bring our bars out of the oven. So once you get that parbaked and it looks nice, go ahead and let it cool completely. I like to let it cool completely before I try to add any of my toppings. Sometimes if you add in the toppings, it can push the crust around because it's still really warm and malleable. Then you lose your nice, even crust. So let it cool at room temperature for about 30 minutes should be good, or like I said, you can make it the day before and then prepare your bars the following day. 9. Bars: Coconut Pecan Bars: We have our sweetened condensed coconut milk, we have our crust, now what? We get to add the toppings, bake it off, and enjoy the pecan coconut short bread bars. What I like to do, now you can go ahead and put your coconut, your pecans, and your chocolate chips into a bowl, mix them all evenly together and dump it onto the crust. But what I like to do is take the mini chocolate chips, and I'm using vegan dark chocolate chips, pour them onto the crust and then put my coconut and my pecans on top of that and give it a nice little mix in the pan with my hands. The purpose of this is, first of all, you're not dirtying another bowl, so bonus. Second of all, a lot of this chocolate chips aren't going to get pulled up into the coconut and pecan. Some will, so you'll have those nice layers, but a lot of it will stay next to the crust. As it bakes, you're going to get a nice layer of crust and then chocolate at the bottom, while you'll still have some chocolate chips dispersed throughout the coconut and pecan. It really makes it look prettier when you cut into the bars and really nice and decadent. Once you have your toppings in your pan and how you want them, go ahead and turn your oven on to 350 degrees Fahrenheit so it can get preheated. Now, we're going to get our sweetened condensed coconut milk in there. What you want to do is evenly pour it over the top, and you really want to make sure that you're getting all of the toppings on the top layer coded in some of that sweetened condensed milk, otherwise they have a tendency to burn in the oven. Make sure everything is really nice and hydrated, and at this point too, it may look like a lot of coconut milk, but don't worry, it sinks down in and more of the liquid is going to evaporate as it bakes. Once you get that nice in there and your oven is preheated, go ahead and pop it into your oven and this is going to bake for about 25-30 minutes. It takes a little bit longer. What you want to look out for is you're going to notice that the coconut milk is bubbling around the outside edges, that's really good. But you also want there to be a few bubbles on the inside, in the middle towards the center. Once you've seen see bubbles that signifying that it's fully cooked the whole way through. You can give it a nice little tap or a little shake and make sure that it's not moving around too much. We want that condensed coconut milk to set up. If it doesn't, then when you cut into the bars they are just going to fall apart. Definitely make sure that it's not moving around too much, and when you're ready to pull it out of the oven, just let it come to room temperature. It's going to take a couple hours, but you definitely want to allow it to come to room temperature and set up fully before you try to cut these bars. Otherwise they do fall apart. It's also great to bake them again later in the day and then maybe let them cool overnight before you try to cut and serve them, or if you bake them in the morning, you can enjoy them later in the day. I like to just cut these bars with a really sharp knife. You can go ahead and use some hot water to heat up your knife and wipe it off on a towel to get really clean cuts since we are dealing with chocolate and sweetened condensed coconut milk. You want to treat it more like a cake or a pie if you're cutting it, you know how to get really nice clean cuts. I like to cut mine into smaller squares because this is a really tall, really rich, decadent bar. For an eight by eight pan, I can typically get 16 portions out of it, cut four one way four the other. I know know seems like too much, but trust me, these bars are very very rich. Once you cut the bars, if you're not going to eat all of them right away, just go ahead and pop some plastic wrap over the top, and they'll just stay at room temperature. I wouldn't refrigerate them after you cut them just because they can tend to get soggy. So room temperature really is the best way to store these bars. 10. Bars: Brownies: Let's talk about brownies. Brownies are such a popular treat for all occasions and not only because they're delicious and chocolatey, but also because they're so versatile, you can add different fillings, dried fruits, nuts, you can add different types of chocolates, vegan dark chocolate, vegan white chocolate. You can even layer them, so you can bake the brownies and add different types of frostings at the end, or you can make your own vegan cheesecake layers, you can swirl it with caramel. There are so many options. You can dress them up, dress them down. A lot of people just like a plane brownie, you can bake them a little bit less for really fudgy rich brownies. Bake them a little bit more for cakey, sturdier brownies, the options are truly limitless. This brownie recipe takes a little bit of extra effort, but I promise you, it's totally worth it. What you want to do is get started with melting your chocolate. You can do this in the microwave in very small increments, starting with about 20 seconds, stirring your chocolate, and then going for about 10-15 seconds stirring after every time until it's fully melted. Also as you're stirring it, stir for a little bit longer to allow the chocolate to fully melt at that temperature before you put it back into the microwave. I like to melt my chocolate over a double boiler or a bain marie, simply because it helps me prevent the chocolate from scorching and crystallizing, because if that happens, you can't use it. I think that the double boiler method is definitely safer and definitely the one I choose. Once you get your chocolate melted, go ahead and preheat your oven. You can turn it on to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and then while that is heating up, you can go ahead and finish the brownies. Now this point, you should have all of your ingredients ready to go. Once that chocolate is melted, you can stir in the sugar and we just want to get the sugar melted down. Once the chocolate and sugar are really nice and combined, you can go ahead and transfer it to a medium bowl, unless you use a sauce that's going to be large enough for the remaining ingredients. Now we want to add in the rest of our wet ingredients at this point. Go ahead and add the almond milk, the oil, and the vanilla. Go-ahead and whisk those together and make sure they are fully combined and then you want to add in the rest of the dry ingredients. That would be the flower, the cocoa, and the salt. Now, I'm using a black cocoa for this recipe, because I love the deep rich flavor of black cocoa. If you don't like black cocoa, go ahead and use whatever type of cocoa that you prefer. It honestly doesn't matter which kind of cocoa you use, they'll all taste really good. Once you get your dry ingredients in there, you want to whisk it just until they're combined. If you see a couple little ribbons of flour left, that's okay, go ahead and add any remaining chocolate chips and mix it just until they're dispersed. You don't want to see any bits of flour or cocoa left, but you also don't want to over mix it at this point. If you over mix it, then your brownies are going to get puffier and more cake like, but we want dense fudgy brownies. Once you have your batter nice and mixed, you want to make sure that you get it into the oven fairly quickly. You don't want the brownie batter to set up, because we're using melted chocolate, it actually brings up the temperature of the batter a little bit. I just did my pan, I use an eight by eight inch square pan and I use cocoa to dust it. I did shortening and some cocoa in there instead of flour, so that when your brownies come out, they won't have flour on the outside of it. It'll be a nice dark cocoa crust. Get that into your pan and go ahead and pop it into the oven. Now, these are going to bake for about 30-35 minutes and what I'm looking for when I'm checking my brownies, is I want there to be just a couple little crumbs stuck to a toothpick or a cake tester when you put it in the center. If you tap on the side of the pan and it looks really wet and it's moving around a lot, the brownies aren't ready yet. Technically, after you take them out, they're going to continue baking and set up a little bit more, but you want to be careful because these brownies have a little bit higher of a liquid content. You definitely want to make sure that you are baking them long enough. If you do misjudge the brownies and you take them out a little bit too early, don't worry, with this brownie recipe, if it doesn't fully cool down, say you check it in a couple minutes after you take it out of the oven and it still seems pretty wet or you're not sure, you can just throw it back into the oven for a few more minutes just to be safe. It's not going to hurt the brownies, trust me. I've had to do this before, because I like the brownies to be right on that edge of nice and fudgy and almost under baked, but not so far that they are cake like. Finding that proper balance takes a little bit of trial and error, so don't get discouraged if you feel like you under baked it or overbaked it and what I love to do with this recipe to, or any recipe really, is if you do under bake it, make a note of what time that you baked it at, so the next time you make the recipe, you can bake it for a little bit longer or if you over baked it and you wanted them to be a little bit more moist and fudgy, then you can make a note of that and bake it a few minutes less next time. That's a really good tip, but once the brownies are nice and baked and that cake tester comes out with just a couple crumbs, maybe a little tiny bit of batter on it, but not a lot, you definitely don't want it to be super wet when you take it out of the oven, go ahead and set them aside and let them cool completely to room temperature. Typically, a couple hours is just fine and I like to use a nice hot knife to cut them, to get nice even cuts, making sure to rinse off my blade with hot water and dry it with a towel before making the next cut. That's going to give you nice clean brownies. They keep really well just in the pan, on the counter at room temperature, with a piece of plastic wrap over top. 11. Sandwich: Ganache Filling: Welcome to another section. Now, we're going to take a look at sandwich cookies. I personally love sandwich cookies because you've got two cookies with a filling. I mean bonus. So in this lesson we're going to make a super, simple vegan ganache, and it really is super simple. First thing I do is get my chocolate into a bowl, and I like making ganache because it's a good way to use up different types of chocolate if you happen to have them in your kitchen. Sometimes I will use, if I have leftover, dark chocolate, semi sweet-chips, baking chocolate, extra dark chocolate callets, or anything that you can add it into your ganache. You just want to get your chocolate into a medium-size bowl, something that's going to be large enough to hold your chocolate and your coconut milk. Now, the coconut milk it's just going to go in a small sauce over medium heat. You want to bring it up to a simmer and then take it of the heat. We don't want to boil it, because if we boil it, it can scorch the chocolate. Just get a right to a simmer, take it off the heat, and pour it right over that dark chocolate. Just let it set for a few minutes to let the chocolate come up to the temperature of the coconut milk, and melt on its own. It does a little bit of the work for you. Then you want to use a whisk, and that's really important because that's going to break up the chocolate the best and make sure that you have a nice smooth ganache. Carefully whisk it very slowly until it all comes together and you have a very smooth mixture. Now, this ganache, particularly, I created the ratio so that it makes a nice smooth filling and it's not going to be really firm at room temperature. It's going to be the same consistency as the cookie when it's done so that when you bite into the sandwich, you don't have the issue of too firm of ganache that the cookie itself doesn't break nicely, or too soft that the filling just squishes out when you bite into the cookie. So that's really important, thinking about when you're making a filled cookie or a sandwich cookie, the actual consistency of your filling, because you want it to be a nice and have very similar densities and textures to your cookie, and your filling. I like to make my ganache the night before, also bake my cookies, so that now with the following morning I can just assemble everything because it's already ready to go. 12. Sandwich: Double Chocolate Cookies: Welcome to another lesson. Now we're going to make the chocolate cookies for our chocolate cookie sandwich. I'm using a black cocoa for this cookie and it's going to give you a very dark, rich cookie flavor. Of course, you can use other types of cocoa. It just depends on what you have available. Substitute out an equal amount, anything will do. The first thing we want to get ready is all of our ingredients. Then also prepare your mixer, if you have an electric mixer with a paddle attachment. You want to start out with getting your sugars. So your brown sugar, your cane sugar, the palm shortening or whichever vegetable shortening that you're using. Get those in the bowl, also with the salt, the vanilla, the cocoa, and you can also put your apple sauce in at this point and get it all incorporated. It's really important to add the cocoa in at this stage because we want the cocoa to be evenly dispersed. Also when you put the cocoa in at this point it saves you from having to sift it. If you were to add it in with the dry ingredients, then you'd have to sift it and combine it well with a flour. But we're just going to put it in, in the beginning, so it's nice and evenly mixed. Get your mixer onto medium speed and it's going to go for a couple minutes. We want to make sure that the mixture is really well incorporated. We're adding a tiny bit of air, but primarily just getting a nice emulsification. Once you have that mixed, you can go ahead and scrape your bowl really well, give it another little mix and then add in all of your flour. This mixture or the recipe is going to make 12 large cookies or 24 small cookies. If you're going to scale up at all, you might want to add your flour in an increments, just so that the flour doesn't come out of the bowl. But you can go ahead and get your flour in there and then start it on low speed. This is also a good time to pop your oven on to 275 degrees Fahrenheit. This is a drop type cookie, so we are baking it at a lower temperature so that it spreads nicely and gets a little bit thinner. That's really important when you're making cookies sandwiches. Because if you think about when you go to take a bite of a cookie sandwich, if the cookies are really thick and bulky, it's going to be hard to get a good bite of the cookie. So the thinner the better. Get your flour in there, get it mixing. Once that's nice and incorporated, you do want to scrape your bowl again, give it another little mix. Then at this point, if you want to add chocolate chips into the dough, go ahead, add them in, gently fold them in with a spatula. Now, what I like to do is calais on the top similar to a chocolate chip drop cookie that we looked at earlier in the course. I'm going to go ahead and scoop my cookies out and then break up the calais and place those on top of the cookies. Now I am using my number 50 cookies scoop again, and I making many sandwich cookies. I like these because number 1, they're cute, but also you feel less guilty eating them, but they're pretty intense. You've got the dark chocolate ganache and the black cocoa cookies. So having them smaller is a little bit nicer. While you might still eat a couple of them, it's easier to just have that much richness in a smaller package. Once you have them all scooped out, you've got your chocolate ready to go. They can go into the oven, and these minis bake anywhere from 7-9 minutes. Mine take about eight minutes to bake perfect. These cookies puff up slightly in the oven. But what you're looking for, is for the center of the cookie to not look wet at all. You want it to just take on that dry look on the top. It's a little bit trickier with the chocolate because the chocolate tends to have a slight shine. But you want a nice uniform top. So the center of the cookie should look the same color as the outside edges of the cookie, and then they'll be ready to come out. You do want to cool these completely. What I like to do is make my ganache the night before, make my cookies the night before or make them at the same time, so then they both have time to cool down and then you can assemble them. Once you're ready to assemble, I like to just put my ganache in a piping bag fitted with a large round tip. Now, this is totally optional. You can also use just a teaspoon and scoop out a teaspoon of it and drop it right into the center of the cookie, whatever works for you. If you don't want a fuss with a piping bag, that's totally fine. I just like to pipe because I feel like it becomes more efficient. You can flip over half of your cookies very easily, pipe on them quickly and then put the other half of the cookie on top and they're all done. Especially great for projection baking. But if you're making small batches, then just go ahead and use a spoon, totally fine. But in professional kitchens, you would use a piping bag because you might have hundreds of cookies to do at a time and you just need to be able to pipe on them very quickly and move along. But it is totally up to you, whatever works in your kitchen. Either way, you're still going have these amazing sandwich cookie filled with ganache. But once they're sandwiched, they're ready to eat. I like to keep mine stored in an airtight container. They don't last very long, meaning you'll probably eat them right away. But they can just be stored at room temperature. I don't recommend the fridge because cookies just don't do well, they dry out in the refrigerator. So keep them out on the counter and they will be just fine. When you're ready to eat these cookies, the cookie is nice and soft and so is the ganache, it should just break right right in half and be a really nice treat. 13. Sandwich: Confetti Cookies: Confetti cookies are one of my favorite cookies because I absolutely love rainbow sprinkles, but also these confetti cookies are nice and soft, a little bit chewy and definitely sweet. Let's get into how to make these cookies. Now with this cookie recipe, it's still a drop cookie, but you're going to notice that it has a higher proportion of granulated sugar and less brown sugar, and that's for two reasons. Number 1, the color, so typically when you're making a confetti cookie or you're putting sprinkles inside of a cookie, you want the cookie dough itself to be lighter in color, so that the sprinkles have a chance to pop off of the background of cookie dough. Also, these cookies get little bit of a chewer texture, which I personally like. They're still really nice and soft, but definitely is something a little bit different. To get started, what you want to do is you want to get your mixing bowl ready, get all of your ingredients out and together, mise en place, and then with your paddle attachment on your stand mixer or your electric mixer, you want to get your sugars in there, get your palm shortening in, your baking soda, salt, flavorings. We're using vanilla extract and vanilla bean paste for this recipe. If you only have one or the other or just vanilla extract, that's okay, just add a little bit more vanilla extract if you don't have the vanilla bean paste, but the vanilla bean paste is a really nice touch because, the sprinkles don't really give any flavor. We want the cookie base to have a really nice vanilla flavor, and then also gets your apple sauce in there. Get that mixing for a couple minutes, just like the rest of our drop cookies, and we're going to be breaking down the sugar, getting everything well incorporated, but not adding into much air at this point. Once that good in mix, scrape your bowl really well and then you can get the flour in there, mix it on low speed until it's mostly combined and then I like to pop it up to high-speed or medium high-speed, just for a few seconds to make sure it's well incorporated and then I like to add in my sprinkles. Now, once you add in your sprinkles, you don't want to mix it very far because you're going to break down the sprinkles, and then they just incorporate into the dough. We're just going to very gently get them into the dough. You can do it by hand or you can do it on low speed with your mixer, your electric mixer, that works whichever you prefer. Now this is a good time to go ahead and pre-heat your oven 275 degrees Fahrenheit, which is my favorite drop cookie temperature. Again, that's going to give us a nice spread on our cookies. The inside is going to be able to cook before the outside gets over baked and dried out. To scoop these, I'm using the number 50 cookie scoop again, and I'm doing two scoops for a regular size cookie and this is going to give you 12 large cookies or six sandwiches. Now these are larger cookie sandwiches, so definitely one is going to be one serving, so if six servings out of your recipe is plenty, or if you need more then go-ahead and double up your cookie dough batch. Once you get those scooped, go ahead and get them into the oven, mine take about 14 minutes to bake, so sometime in that two-minute window, 13-15 minutes should be good depending on your oven. You want them to look nice and uniform. They should not take on very much color, but you want them to just look dry in the middle. It shouldn't look wet at all. Always keep in mind that the cookies once you want to take them out of the oven, continue to bake, so if you bake them too long in the oven and they're going to bake even more once you take them out of the oven. You want to make sure that you get them right at that point where they just baked enough and then take them out. Go ahead and let them cool completely, at room temperature, it's really important that they cool completely because if you try to sandwich them before they're cool, two things are going to happen. First of all they're going to break, they're not going to be stable enough. Second of all, the frosting or the filling when we go to put it in there, it's going to melt, so you want to make sure that they are nice and cool, but I will see you in the next lesson where we're going to talk about the filling. 14. Sandwich: Vanilla Bean Filling : This vanilla bean filling is really easy to whip up so much so that it might be your new go to base filling. Its got a lovely vanilla flavor, we're going to be adding vanilla extract and vanilla bean paste into it. It's also nice, light, and airy and sweet. Let's get started. Now, I'm using my standard mixer with a paddle attachment. The reason is that this filling its important to incorporate air into it. We want it to be nice and fluffy and have a really nice cloud-like mouthfeel, which is really perfect for these cookies sandwiches. I want to start out by getting my powdered sugar. I'm using organic powdered sugar because it's definitely vegan. I'm putting in my palm shortening, I like to use palm shortening for this specifically because other types of vegetable shortening tend to leave a greasy mouth feel where as palm shortening has a little bit of a lower melting point. When it gets into your mouth, the temperature of your mouth is going to melt it down a little bit better and you're not going to get that coating on the roof of your mouth. That's really something to consider. Another brand CuzCo I know does leave a greasy mouthfeel, so I like to stick to palm shortening specifically, some nice organic brands. I believe Nutiva makes a nice organic palm shortening, so that's a brand to look out for. You can get them in the natural food aisle at the grocery store, or even if you want to try to order them online, you can find some nice, like one pound tubs just for home use. But let's get those ingredients into the mixer. I like to start out on low speed because powdered sugar tends to create a cloud if you get it going too fast. Go ahead and get it on low speed, get it mixed together pretty well once the sugar is incorporated into the shortening and it might look pretty dry, but don't worry, it will loosen up. Once it's pretty well incorporated, go ahead and bump it up to a medium speed. We're going to let that go for a couple minutes. We really want to break down the sugar, make sure there's no lumps of sugar left in there because you'll notice I did not sift my sugar at all. I don't like sifting. I try to create my recipes to make sure that you don't have to sift is very tedious. Go ahead and let that go for a couple minutes. Once that's good and mixed and definitely fluffier in texture, you want to give the bowl a really good scrape because the shortening has a tendency to try to hide in the bowl, especially down in the bottom. Give that a good scrape, mix it a little bit longer, and then we can add in the rest of our liquid ingredients. I like to just put my mixer on low speed and stream them in. I am using vanilla bean paste. I love the little black flecks that you get. If you can't find vanilla bean paste, you can use vanilla beans. But also I realized they're pretty pricey. You can totally omit them if you don't have them and just use vanilla extract, just increase the amount of vanilla extract and replace it with the vanilla bean paste. Once you've got those nice and mixed, if the mixture looks like it's separating or starting to curdle, don't worry, just keep mixing and it'll start to come together. Once it does come together, stop your mixer, give it a good little scrape, and then bump it back up to medium speed again for another two minutes. Now what I like to do is bake my cookies, pull them out of the oven, and then while they're cooling, I can go ahead and make my filling. The filling takes 20 minutes, maybe from start to finish, measuring your ingredients and getting everything together and mixed and getting your piping bag ready. Your cookies are going to be a lot cooler and then you can just wait until your cookies are cool completely and your fillings already ready to go. It works out. Your frosting should be ready to go. Now, I'm using a large piping bag to hope my frosting in the center of the cookies because I think that it just gives a nicer look. Again, if you don't want to mess around with the piping bag, then you don't have to or you can use a spatula or a spoon to get your filling into the middle of the cookies. What I like to do is set up my piping bag, get my filling in there. Then once my cookies are completely cool, flip over half the cookies, pipe a nice little design in the center. I'm using a large startup. I think that it gives these pretty edges or bridges along the outside edges of the filling. When you look at the cookie, it just gives it a really nice finished look. I'm piping in there and then topping off the cookies with the other half of the cookie. This is optional, but I think it looks really cute and really nice. I rolled half of my cookies or one half of each cookie in more rainbow sprinkles that you could do all of the sides. You don't have to do this at all. But I just love the way it looks and then you get more sprinkles Who wouldn't want that? But once they are completely done, they are ready to enjoy. You can keep this at room temperature. You don't need to refrigerate them. Just keep them in an airtight container until you're ready to eat them. 15. Molded: Toasted Almonds : Welcome to another section. We're going to be looking at mounded cookies now. In this particular lesson, we're just going to simply see how to toast almonds. We're going to be prepping them for our almond horns in the next lesson. Now, this is really easy. I recommend that you use sliced almonds because they will lay flat on the cookies. If you use slivered almonds, they tend not to toast as evenly and they don't stick to the cookies as well. You definitely want to try to get sliced almonds. Whole almonds are just too hard and clunky to use for the cookies. So go ahead and get a cookie sheet ready. You can just line it with parchment paper or a Silpat mat or a nonstick baking mat, whichever you have. You definitely want to make sure that you have a barrier on there, and you also want to preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, I like to do smaller amounts of almonds. If you're ever toasting a large amount of almonds, it's better to do it in smaller batches simply because if you can spread your almonds out very evenly, almost just a layer, like the almonds aren't on top of each other at all, you're going to get a really nice even toast. Also, the reason that we're toasting them before we bake the cookies is because if you put them on the cookies and just toast them in the oven or try to bake them, a lot of the times, the almonds won't toast as easily if they're already on a baked good. Number 1, they're usually jammed on top of each other and in an odd angles. Number 2, the baked good itself might be adding lots of moisture that's protecting the almonds from toasting. So you want to toast the almonds, get a little bit of color on them before you add them to your baked good. So just get these out on a nice even layer, and they're going to go for about eight minutes. I typically can tell when my almonds are ready because I can smell the toasted almond smell. It's very distinct. You'll know it when you do this in your own kitchen, but you want to get them nice and toasty. They're going to take on a little bit of golden color and then you can just take them out of the oven, set them aside, and get started on your almond cookies. You don't need to do these a day ahead of time, just do them right before you're ready to make your cookies. They should be cool enough to handle when you go to roll out your cookies. 16. Molded: Almond Horns: If you love almonds or the flavor of almond, then almond horns might be your newer favorite cookie. They are so intense with almond flavor because they're based off of almond paste, it's the primary ingredient. You don't add a whole lot to these, but they bake up into these really lovely cookies that have an intense almond flavor, they're crunchy and crispy on the outside, soft in the center. They are really amazing, definitely one of my favorites. So it's important though to know that we are using almond paste for this recipe and not marzipan. Sometimes they are confused with one another, but marzipan actually has a glucose added to it to make it more moldable and elastic. The almonds are ground down a lot finer, so you get more of a pliable dough that you can roll out into sheets or shape into fruits or figurines. Whereas almond paste itself has less sugar added to it and the almonds are ground coarser. Almond paste is more of an ingredient while marzipan is more of a final product. So you definitely want to make sure that you're getting almond paste for this recipe. To get started, you want to get that almond paste into your mixer, or if you're doing this by hand or with an electric hand mixer, you just want to break up the almond paste. It's pretty firm, so you want to get it down into smaller pieces, really break it down before you try to add in any other ingredients, but once you do that, you can go ahead and add in the applesauce. The applesauce is going to break it down even more so that we can add in our dry ingredients. Now there might be some pieces of almond paste that don't break down, don't worry that's okay. Our dry ingredients are going to basically work out the rest of those almond paste pieces. So once you have those pretty well mixed, you can go ahead and add in your powdered sugar. We're using powdered sugar in this and non-regular granulated sugar, because number 1, the almond paste itself already has granulated sugar in it. Number 2, we want these cookies to hold up their shape as they bake. The powdered sugar has a finer grind to it, so it's not going to melt and spread as much. Also, it has corn starch in it, so that's going to give our cookies a little bit more stability. You want to get the powdered sugar in there and get it well incorporated, making sure that you're strapping your mixer to scrape your bowl so that it's all nice and well mix. At this stage, it should help break down more of that almond paste and get everything pretty well combined. Once that's well-mixed, go ahead and add in your flour. Now the flour is the part that really is just going to bring it all together and it's going to look more like a dough. Add in your flour, get it all mixed together, but go ahead and get them mixed together. Make sure it's well mixed, make sure you're scraping your bowl, and that everything is nice and evenly dispersed. We're not adding any flavoring service because the almond paste really shines through. Once you have your cookie dough mixed, you do want to get it into the refrigerator. I usually just leave it in my bowl and pop it in the fridge. I don't find it necessary to take it out of the bowl and wrap it into a lava, just put it in the refrigerator, leave it in there for at least a half an hour. You want the dough to firm up so that you can mold it. Otherwise, it tends to get really sticky. Once your cookie dough is nice and chilled, you want to gather up the things that you're going to need to mold these cookies. I like to have a little dish of water because if I dip my fingers in water, rub it on my hands, it's going to protect my hands from getting too sticky from the dough. Because while the dough is chilled, the heat from your hands is still going to warm it up as you work with it. But get that little dish of water. Also, get out your baking sheet lined with your parchment paper or your non-stick baking mat and have your almonds ready to go. Now, personally, the tray that I baked my almonds on, I just mold my cookies right on that tray and then push the almonds out of the way and put my cookies on there. I'm not going to dirty another tray. That's a nice little tip if you just wanted to do it that way and also you're, almonds are already nice and spread out, so it makes it really easy to roll your cookies in those almonds. To get started molding, you want to portion out your dough. You can just eyeball it, you're going to get about 11-12. Well, I should say 10-12 cookies, I get about 11. You can go ahead and portion them out, roll them into balls if that helps. Then you can see that all of them are equal in size. But once you do that, you want to have your hands just damp. You can go ahead and roll these out between your hands, but you're going to roll them into a log shape and then taper that log slightly on the edges. Then once you have that, just go ahead and roll it in the ovens and shape it into a crescent shape. Again, I'm just doing this on the same sheet tray as my toasted almonds we're already toasted on and I'm going to go ahead and just set them off to the side on the same sheet tray. It should be enough almonds to cover all of your molded cookies. You can just continue on same thing, dampen your hands between molding each cookie, roll it into a ball, into a log shape, taper it, rolled in almonds, and form it into a crescent. Once you have them all nice and molded, you want to pop them back into the refrigerator for about another 30 minutes to an hour. Right before they have set up, you can go ahead and preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. So this second chilling is just going to help the cookies stay together a little bit and prevent a little bit more spreading in the oven. What you're looking for is that they start to puff up a little bit, they might start to crack some, but you don't want them to spread too much. If they're starting to spread a lot, get them out of the oven they're over baking. The final cookie after it has completely cooled and set for a couple of hours, is still going to have a chewy moist center, but that's the nature of these cookies. Don't worry, you didn't under bake them that's just how they turn out. But they're really lovely because if you let them sit or if we make them the day before, by the next day, the center dries out a little bit and leaves you with a nice crispy outer edge to the cookie at a really soft chewy center, which is why I love these cookies so much. Go ahead and then take them out of the oven, let them cool completely, set up, hang out, and then we're going to dip them in chocolate. 17. Molded: Chocolate Enrobing: So your almond horn should be completely cooled at this point. They should have been out of the oven for at least a couple hours. They had a chance to set up and become sturdy enough to dip. But once they are ready, you can dip them in dark chocolate. Now this is optional. Personally, I like to do some in dark chocolate, some without. I love the dark chocolate flavor, but I also love the almond flavors, so it just depends. But I only dip the ends of the almond horns in chocolate. You can do the ends like I'm going to show you. You can also just coat the bottom, which would be a really nice, pretty look. But it's up to you. Now I got started melting my chocolate over a nice small, simmering sauce pan of water and I like to melt my chocolate this way because it helps prevent scorching. I can keep an eye on it. You can melt it in the microwave if you're comfortable with that. You just want to make sure that you're only going for about 10 seconds at a time, taking it out, mixing your chocolate really, really well, making sure there's no pockets of melted chocolate anywhere that could burn. But I like to use the double boiler method. Also using the double boiler method, I can just keep it on the heat as well and it keeps my chocolate melted and I can work with it a little bit longer. I'm just using a dark chocolate that has no dairy in it. You can use vegan specific chocolate chips or whatever you like. Even if you had a vegan white chocolate, that would be really good on these cookies as well. Go ahead and get your chocolate melted. I'm just putting my cookies right back onto the same sheet that I baked them on. So from start to finish: I toasted my almonds, I baked my cookies on it, and now I'm dipping and replacing right back onto that cookie sheet without having to use other sheets or other equipment. Something to keep in mind if you don't like to do a bunch of dishes like me. So I'm just dipping the ends of my almond horns in the chocolate and I am making sure to knock off the excess chocolate because if you don't give them a little scrape or a little shake when you put them back on a cookie sheet, the chocolate is going to pool around the cookies and it gives it less of a finished look. So I like to make sure I get any of that excess chocolate off, lay it back onto my cookie sheet. Once I dip all of my cookies, you can let it set up at room temperature, or you can pop it into the refrigerator for about 30 minutes to speed up the process. Once your chocolate is set up, go ahead and enjoy these cookies. They are so amazing. If you're not going to eat them all right away, just keep them in an airtight container for a couple of days, but I'm pretty sure you're going to be eating these cookies very quickly. 18. Molded: Mexican Wedding Cookies: Welcome to another lesson. Now we're going to take a look at Mexican wedding cookies. You may also know them as snowball cookies, depending on where you grew up, but they are these really fun round cookies covered in powdered sugar. Traditionally they're used for weddings, however, they're also very popular at holiday time. I love these cookies because they firm up but they have a crispy texture and then there's just a lot of sweetness and they look really beautiful on a dessert or a cookie spread. But let's get into how to make these cookies. I have my mixing bowl ready to go with the paddle attachment. I'm going to put my shortening salt, vanilla, and powdered sugar into the bowl and we're going to start by creaming this. Now you may have noticed that we're using powdered sugar as the sweetener in this cookie dough. The reason is that because these are firmer cookie. Because it's in a ball and it doesn't flatten out like other cookies, in the center if we use granulated sugar, number 1, granulated sugar as it heats up and starts to melt in the oven, that's what causes cookies to spread. Same thing with brown sugar and brown sugar is going to cause even more spreading because it has the extra molasses in it. We don't want these cookies to spread and this is pretty typical for molded type cookies. These are going to hold the same shape as when they go into the oven. We're using powdered sugar because it's going to give the cookie more structure and also when the cookie bakes, because we're not baking these cookies for a very long time at all, you're not going to have any crystallized sugar that's going to stay in the center of the cookie and not bake or not break down. With the powdered sugar, it's already so fine, you're going to keep a nice uniform texture throughout the cookie. So that's really important to know. We're going to get those ingredients in and then get them creamed. Medium, medium-high speed for a couple of minutes, it's going to be paler in color and take on a little bit of air. That's what we're looking for. Then once we get to that point, we want to scrape the bowl really well and just make sure everything is nice and homogeneous. Once that is good to go, our flour can go in. Now once the flour goes in, and you start to mix it, you're going to see that the cookie dough is getting really dry and crumbly. Don't worry, you're going to keep mixing it until it really comes together. We don't want to leave it at the crumbly stage. It's contrary indicative in this cookie recipe, we're over mixing it to make sure that the flour is really a well-mixed in at the shortening so that we have a nice uniform cookie because we don't want it to be crumbly, it's not going to hold together. You're going to go a little bit longer than normal with this cookie dough until it's nice and almost becomes like a dry dough but it's still holds together. Then we're going to fold in our pecans or you can use your mixer on low speed. I'm just using chopped pecans. If you can find chopped pecans at the store, then that's amazing. If not, you'll want to chop them until like a quarter-inch chop. You want pretty small pieces, if the pieces are too large because the dough is drier, it won't hold together when you try to roll it up. You want the pieces to be pretty small, but still big enough that when you take a bite of the cookie, you can still get a nice bite of the pecan inside. The pecans are really traditional and you can also see why they would be used for weddings, but also for holiday time because pecans are a holiday nut or Christmas nut. You can use other types of nuts, that's just the traditional type typically used with this cookie. Once we get the pecans in there and nice and dispersed, the dough becomes a little more crumbly. As you're scooping, it helps to really pack the cookie dough into your scoop. Again, I'm using my number 50 scoop because it mix a perfect size for this type of cookie. You want to get it nice and packed together. When you get the cookie dough out of the scoop, you want to very gently roll it into a nice uniform ball. You don't have to either, if you just want to scoop it and then put the flat side down on a cookie sheet and bake it that way, that works totally fine. However, I like to have them nice and round. They just look a little bit nicer and more authentic when you do it that way, but it's totally up to you if you find that when you're trying to roll them out, that they're just too dry and crumbly, then go ahead and just pack it in your cookie scoop and scoop it right onto your cookie tray. Before you start scooping, you can go ahead and preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. It's a higher temperature, but we're going to bake these for a really short period of time and because they don't have granulated sugar in them, they're not going to brown on the outside as much, plus they also have that extra protective sugar barrier. Once you have your cookies scooped and your oven is preheated, you can go ahead and roll them in powdered sugar. These are going to get doused twice in powdered sugar, yes, twice. You want to roll them are really well in the powdered sugar and then space them evenly onto your cookie sheet. If you have a 13 by 9 cookie sheet, then all of them will fit together, they really don't spread that much. Even if you have to put them pretty close together on your cookie sheet, the whole batch should fit on one standard cookie sheet. You're going to get those into the oven and they're going to bake for about 12 minutes. Once they start to crack, you know they're done, that's how you can tell with these cookies. Because just looking at them, it's pretty impossible to tell when they are done. So once they start to crack, just go ahead and take them out of the oven. That means the center has baked and started to expand and they're done. With these, you want to make sure that you cool them completely before you put them in the powdered sugar again. Because we're using vegan powdered sugar or organic powdered sugar, it will melt if it comes into contact with heat. You want to make sure that they're completely cool before you put them back in the powdered sugar. You've got two options here, you can just use the same ball because there's no dairy, you can use the same bowl that you rolled them in before you baked them or if you're in a hurry what's really nice is you can put some powdered sugar in a big bowl, put all your cookies in there and just shake them around a little bit, being careful that nothing comes out of the bowl or you can use your hands and fold them in like you're tossing a salad and you can coat them all at once. Now if you're not going to serve these cookies right away, you can, of course, wait until you're ready to serve them and put them in the powdered sugar or if you already did the powdered sugar and you're waiting half a day for people to enjoy them, then you can douse them in powdered sugar again, just keep that bowl around or put it in a airtight container and just have that sugar ready to go so they look nice and fresh when they're ready to be eaten. What I typically do or what I recommend is once they're cool, put them in an airtight container and if you do this the night before, it's perfect because then the following morning, the cookies have held in their moisture they are nice and cool and then you can roll them in the powdered sugar and then enjoy them throughout the day. That will make them seem really fresh because if you been up cookies, right when they finish cooling, they're still going to release a little bit of liquid if there's any left in there any of it evaporating and it hold that in when you put them in an airtight container. That's why cookies, if you put them in a container, they get softer over time because any of the moisture that would normally evaporate from cookies that sit out on the counter, it just stays in there and it stays with the cookie and it marinates. That works really well for this type of cookie. 19. Filled: Cornmeal Marshmallow Cookies: Filled cookies have been around for a while. It's just more modern filled cookies are full of more interesting and fun ingredients. I remember when I was a kid, my parents used to bring home raisin-filled cookies all of the time and that was pretty much normal for where I grew up. But now, I'm going to show you how to add in some more interesting types of fillings. In this lesson, we're going to take a look at cornmeal cookies filled with marshmallows. It's totally different and might sound little odd, but they're actually really, really good. If you've ever had cornbread with something sweet, it's like that idea or that flavor combination. Let's get started with our cornmeal cookies. Now I'm using my stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, and I'm getting all of my wet ingredients in there, along with sugar, palm shortening, baking soda, and salt. There's also a little bit of vanilla in here just to balance out the flavor a little bit. You can get those into your mixer and get them mixing on medium speed for a couple of minutes. We want to make sure that everything is well incorporated. We're not adding too much air and the sugar has a chance to break down a little bit. Once those are well-mixed, go ahead and scrape your bowl and you can get your flour mixed in. I start out on low speed, bump it up to medium speed just until it's mixed together, and give it a nice little bursts at the end. Just to make sure it's fully incorporated. Now, I'm adding my cornmeal at the end. The reason is is that cornmeal is just ground corn, so it doesn't actually add any gluten. It's not a wet ingredient. It acts as a dry good in the sense of if you added chocolate chips, or dried fruit, or something like that to your cookie dough, you want to add it at the end. Now, I'm using a fine ground cornmeal. You can use whatever you can find. What I do like is that it has a little bit of texture. You can use white cornmeal, you can use yellow cornmeal, whatever you can get a hold of works just fine. Use the same weight that is in the recipe. Add it in at the end. You want to make sure that it's nice and well incorporated. Then we get to stuff these with marshmallows. Once my cookie dough is ready to go, this is the point where I do preheat my oven. We're going to be making these 275 degrees Fahrenheit and filling them with vegan marshmallows. If you can't get a hold of vegan marshmallows, you can fill this with any type of ingredient that would go well with cornmeal. So you could fill it with dried fruit or just whatever you would like to fill it with. You just don't want to try to fill it with any liquids because they will soak into the dough or seep out of the dough. It needs to be a little bit sturdier of an ingredient to fill these cookies. I have a cookie sheet already prepared with my non-stick baking map. You can use parchment, whatever you have available. I'm using a number 50 cookie scoop. The trick with this is to scoop a ball of dough and then you want to flatten it out. Now this dough is slightly tacky. It shouldn't be sticking to your hands completely. But you do want to take a little bit extra care with it. If you want to dampen your hands just ever so slightly with water to keep it off of your skin, you can do that. Go ahead and flatten out one of your dough balls. I'm using vegan mini marshmallows. Using a number of 50 scoop, I find that about five marshmallows is a good amount to fill the center of these cookies. I put five marshmallows piled in the center of the cookie. Then I want to scoop another dough ball and flatten that out as well and lay it over the top and seal the edges. You do want to make sure that the marshmallows are completely covered at this point. Because if not, they have a tendency to break the dough and really push out of the cookie. Now some of them probably might still get little cracks where you can see the marshmallow, that's okay, no big deal. We know they're filled with marshmallows, but it's good to have a nice seal on it. Once you scoop all of those out, they're going to go into the oven and they're going to bake for about 15 minutes. Now you want to be careful with these cookies. When you mix the dough, you really want to make sure that your ingredients aren't cold at all. Like your apple sauce shouldn't be cold, you shouldn't chill the dough at all, because we want that dough to bake fairly quickly because the marshmallows are going to continue to puff in the oven. The longer they're in the oven, the more they're going to puff up and the higher chance that they're going to just break open your cookies and create these unstable cookies. Make sure that your dough is definitely room temperature before it goes into the oven. If you need to let them sit on the counter for a little bit to make sure that they're not cold, then that's totally fine. Get them into the oven 15 minutes, pull them out. You should be able to tell that the dough in the center is nice and dry. It doesn't look wet at all. Optionally, you can sprinkle a little more of that cornmeal on top of your cookies before they go in the oven. I know I did, and it gives them a little bit of an extra crunch. But once they come out of the oven go and let them cool completely at room temperature, they're going to look puffed up because of the marshmallows, but they will sink back down and you'll get a nice flat cookie. These are best at room temperature. Usually take about an hour. But then you can enjoy them and you should be able to break them open. The marshmallow pulls apart. They're going to be nice and sweet in the center, but still have that corn flavor on the outside. They're interesting and I definitely think that they're something modern and fun to try. 20. Filled: Strawberry Filling : Now you've seen how to fill cookies, brief dry ingredients, but what about something like a fruit filling or fruit puree? Well, we're going to take a look at a strawberry filling in this lesson. This is a really easy filling to put together. Hardly any work at all. Your stove is going to do most of the work for you. Now I'm using frozen strawberries. The reason is that when you freeze fruit, it breaks down the fibers as it solves, a lot easier than if you use fresh fruit. But if you can only get fresh fruit, don't worry, it works just fine. I'm going to be adding in my fruit and some sugar into my sauce pan. The sugar is just going to help break down the fruit a little bit more and obviously sweeten it. Now, I'm putting it on medium-low heat or low heat and I'm just letting it go for about 35-40 minutes. You want to give it a chance to really break the fruit down and cook off some of that liquid so that you get a nice, thick fruit puree. Once that is nice and cooked down and you can use any type of Berry for this. You can use raspberries, blackberries, blueberries. You can try cranberries. Anything that has some fiber to the fruit should make a nice fruit puree or fruit filling. You want to let that cook. Once it's nice and thick, I'm just using a fork to break down my strawberries. No, I don't want big, whole strawberries in the filling because it's obviously not going to go into a cookie very well. So I want to break them down with a fork, but you don't have to put this in a blender or anything like that. It's fine if it has some pieces of fruit still left in it. You do want to let this come to room temperature once you take it off of the heat and then you can put it into the refrigerator. I like to make my fruit filling the day before or the night before. Then just get into the fridge and make my cookies the following day. You can make it up to seven days ahead of time depending on your schedule and what works best for you. You can even make this filling in a larger batch only pull out what you need for the cookies and freeze the rest and use it for future projects. I mean, fruit filling is pretty versatile, pretty easy to work with. 21. Filled: Strawberry Cookies : Let's take a look at some strawberry filled cookies. Now we already looked at how to make the strawberry filling. We're going to not only fill these cookies with that strawberry filling, but we're also going to add it into the cookie dough. This cookie dough is another drop style cookie dough, and we've used that a lot, but the importance of talking about it is that you can use a drop type cookie dough for a lot of different styles of cookies, and a good base drop cookie dough recipe is really versatile. For example, we already learned how to make the confetti cookies. The recipe that we're using for this, we're just substituting some of the apple sauce with some of our strawberry filling to make our strawberry cookie. It's really that simple. If you want to add in interesting flavors, you can take some of the basic cookie recipes from this course, add in different extracts. Substitute some apple sauce for some types of fruit purees, you can substitute milk for fruit juices. You definitely have some different options. You can try different sugar ratios, you can omit some of your flour for other types of flour, they make great seed flour. You can do more course flours, such as oat flour. You can try different things like olive flour, there are really a lot of options. When you look at the recipe for this lesson compared to the confetti recipe, compared to the chocolate chunk dropped cookie. You see that they're all very similar, we just do a little bit different ratios or different amounts of ingredients to a completely different results. But let's get into making this strawberry cookie. We're doing our regular drop process, adding in the majority of our ingredients our sugars, our apple sauce, we're adding in that strawberry puree at this point, shortening salt, any flavorings, and baking soda and we're creaming that for a couple of minutes. Now, the difference is with this, and when you add other fruits, you do want to keep in mind that some of them might create odd colors. If we just add in the strawberry puree what's going to happen is, it's going to make the cookie itself gray, and that's not a pleasant color. So I am adding in some beet powder. Now the beet powder you're not going to taste it in the final result of the cookie, but it's going to add a natural pink or reddish hue to our cookies, to make them all look a little bit more like their strawberry flavored. Now, they're still going to have kind of an interesting color. If you want to try to find some natural strawberry powder to add into your cookie dough, you can consider that or if you could find some other types of natural colors that are a little more concentrated than beet powder, that are going to add too much moisture or too much flavor to your cookie dough recipe, you can seek those out. But I'm just adding some beet powder to give it a little more of a pinkish hue to the cookie dough. This method is very similar to what we did with the cornmeal cookies. We're going to pre-heat our oven, prepare our cookie sheet, and get a little bit of water ready to dough just in case, because this dough is slightly tacky as well. But you want to use your number 50 cookie scoop or if you're using a table spoon to scoop, you want to roll your dough into a ball and flatten it out pretty well. We're going to be doing about half to the teaspoon of filling. You want to be really careful and not over fill these cookies because you won't be able to seal them. Staying about a teaspoon or less is perfect, and the filling recipe that comes with this lesson should be just enough to fill these cookies and also adding strawberry filling to the dough as well. It also helps to scoop out all of your bases, you'll have 12 bases, and then you can scoop out your filling evenly into each of those 12, whatever's left over of each strawberry filling and then you'll have a nice even amount. Then you want to take your number 52 scoop, scoop out another dough ball, and you want to get this one really flattened. The reason is that we want to make sure that there's enough surface area to cover all of the fruit and come down the sides of the base, so we get a nice seal. If you don't get a nice seal what can happen is, that fruit filling whenever there is a little crack, it's going to seep out there, and you're not going to get a nice then filling when you break open the cookie. Very carefully, make sure you get it sealed around the edges and you can go ahead and get those into the oven, and we're going to bake them until they look uniformly dry. With these cookies they can take a little bit longer, so just keep an eye on them. If for some reason your fruit filling has a lot of moisture and it's still, it might not bake up as quickly. If your cookie dough looks a little bit wet in the center, when you're checking it, go ahead, give it another minute and check it again. Go ahead and take them out when they're done, and let them cool completely to room temperature. These cookies are a little bit more fragile, so if they don't cool completely, they can pull apart a little bit, but because they are filled with strawberry filling, they are also good, really warm. It's up to you. But once the final cookie is nice and cold and set up, it should be very soft, slightly crispy on the edges, and when you break it open, you're going see a nice thin ribbon of strawberry filling in the center and they are absolutely packed with that strawberry flavor. 22. Ice Box: Jelly Roll Cookies: Roll jam cookies are some of my favorite at holiday time. They're so pretty, they have a short bread flavor and texture to them and a pretty ribbon of jam swirled right in the center. In this lesson you're going to learn how to get that pretty swirl. First thing you want to do is get all of your ingredients together and then get your mixer ready. I'm using a paddle attachment for this recipe. Once your mixer is ready to go, you want to get your ingredients into the bowl. We're going to do sugar, shortening, salt, baking powder, and vanilla, and we're going to cream those together. I like to get mine onto medium speed and let it go for a couple of minutes. We are actually incorporating some air into this. You'll notice in the final result that these cookies are a little bit puffier and lighter in texture. Get those nice and creamed. Then you want to stop, scrape your bowl really well and continue mixing. We're doing this recipe a lot like a traditional cookie dough recipe. Once you have your butter and sugar, nice and creamed, and we've got our smaller ingredients, they're well dispersed, we're going to add in the applesauce. We're going to mix that for a little bit as well. Make sure it's fully incorporated. Scrape your bowl and then add in the flour. Now with the flour, you'll start on low just to get it mixed in so that it's not coming up out of your bowl. Then you can knock it up a couple of notches in speed just until it's fully mixed in. Once your dough is nice and ready to go, you want to gather up some other tools. In order to get our jam roll in the center, we're going to need some either parchment paper or a plastic wrap. You'll want to have a ruler and a rolling pin or something cylindrical that you can use to roll it out with. Basically we're going to roll this out to 12.5 inches by eight inches. I like to put it between two pieces of parchment paper or plastic wrap depending on what you have, and roll it out as evenly as possible. As you're rolling, it's good to roll from the center towards the edges. You can use your ruler to shore up the edges, so they're nice and straight, or you can use your parchment paper or your plastic wrapped kind of folded back on itself. You want it to be a really nice and evenly thick. You want the edges to be nice and straight as well. What that's going to do, is make sure that when you roll up the cookies, that you have very uniform roll throughout, so that when you finally slice and bake the cookies, they all look the same and they all bake the same. That's also really important. You don't want to have thin spot in some places and thick spots in other places, because then you'll have some large cookies and some small cookies and they won't bake consistently. It's really important to just take your time, get it to where it's about a quarter-inch thick and you have those specific measurements. It looks very nice and even and the edges are straight. Once we have that really nice and rolled out, we're going to take our jam. Now, it may be tempting to add extra jam. It may look like it's just not enough. But trust me, it's the perfect amount. If you add more, what's going to happen is it's going to try to push out. The same thing if you have ever done like a general cake, where if you put too much filling in, it mushes out and becomes a huge mess, so having the right amount of jam going in is super critical. You want to spread it out as evenly as possible. I like using a small offset spatula that's going to give you the smoothest most uniform layer of jam. You can use any type of jam that you like. Nice too, because you can make a couple of different batches and have different flavors. People can try to figure out which type of jam, is in the center. But get it nice and spread out. You do want to leave a little gaps at the bottom and the top so that when you roll it up, it actually has an area where the dough can stick to itself, and it encloses the whole roll, it keeps all of the jam in there. But you want to carefully start rolling it into a roll and it helps to work from one side to the other, or if you can just gently lift up on your parchment paper or plastic wrap, as you're tucking with your fingers, that front edge that's going into the roll, kind of a specific technique. Once you get that first edge, which really is the most difficult part, the rest of it rolls out fairly easily. Once you get it all rolled up, you do want is finally seal that outside edge to the roll itself so that the jam can't leak out at all, and the roll will stay nice and enclosed. The nice part about having it already in your parchment paper or plastic wrap, is you can just put it right into the freezer that way. Now, these are technically icebox cookies. You want to freeze or refrigerate them before you slice them. That's really where the icebox part comes in or adding any type of cold to it, is getting these cookies rolled up. If you were to just try and slice them, it would flatten the cookies out and they would break and it wouldn't work out. You need to get them really chilled in order to slice them nicely and keep that spiral shape. Now one thing I will tell you is that if you just put the roll directly into the freezer, it might start to flatten out on one side. What I like to do, is put mine in the freezer, and then after about 15 minutes, I take it back out. You can set a timer for this. That's exactly what I do and just reshape it back into a log. If it seems like it's not firm enough after that 15 minutes, then you can put it in for about another 10 minutes and shape it back into a log, and it shouldn't be soft enough that you can make it into a log, but also firm enough that it'll retain that shape. 23. Ice Box: Chocolate Hazelnut Cookies: Let's take a look at this chocolate hazelnut ice box cookie. We're actually using the same base recipe that we use for the role GM Dough, except we're lowering flour and then we're adding chocolate to half of it and hazelnut to the other. The exact same mixing method. Once you complete the dough, you'll notice that the flour is slightly lower, you will actually separate the dough in half. You want to weigh half out into a bowl using your scale and set that aside and leave the other half in your mixer. To the half that's in your mixing bowl, go ahead and add in the hazelnut flour. The reason we're adding the hazelnut flour first is if you did the chocolate, then whatever is left in the bowl you'd want to wash the bowls that you weren't getting the chocolate into your hazelnut dough, whereas the hazelnut dough, whatever is left in the bowl, we don't have to wash it out, because it's not dark in color and you will notice that when you mix with chocolate in. I'm just mixing the hazelnut into the dough just until incorporated. Then I want to have some partial paper or plastic wrap ready to go, and then I can just pop that hazelnut dough onto the parchment paper, set it aside, then the other half the dough that was observed we can throw back into the bowl. No need to clean it. Add in the cocoa, and mix just until combined. Now you've got your two doughs ready. The fun part comes when you get to twist them together. I just have one piece of parchment paper because we're not necessarily going to be spreading anything on the dough, we're just twisting it in a very specific way. You can go ahead and shape this into a square or rectangular log. You can do a round log similar to the general cookies. It's up to you. I like to do a square log. I just take my time, make sure that I get it into a log shape, and then wrap it up in the parchment and reshape it into that square shape, and I use the same technique to keep those sharp angles. I put it in the freezer for about 15 minutes, take it out, shape it a little bit more, put it back in and it's usually good to go. 24. Ice Box: Roll Cookie Cutting: What I love about these icebox cookies is they're really versatile, so you can add different types of ingredients into them. You can do a marbling effect, you can do a ribbon effect, you can do lots of unique and creative things but the bonus is that you can keep them in the freezer. Part of making this is that they get frozen except that you can freeze them for up to a month. If you have a busy schedule or if you want to be prepared way ahead of time for holidays or special events, you can make these whenever, roll them up, put them into the freezer, and then pull them out and slice them whenever you want baked fresh cookies. There are really ideal for that. Now to bake these cookies, you're going to bake them straight from the freezer. Go ahead. Once your cookies are nice and frozen, you can go ahead and preheat your oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit and also get a baking sheet ready with parchment paper or a non-stick baking mat. Then what you want to do is you want to take the roll out of the freezer. It's going to stay completely frozen and want to use a serrated blade. That's really important because it's what's going to give you a nice clean cut. If you use a blunt blade, it's going to put too much pressure on the cookie and cause the cookie to crack. But the serrated blade with the back-and-forth motion is going to keep the cookie intact and not miss shape it at all. You want to cut them about a quarter inch thick. I'm using my ruler again and just setting it down next to the roll and looking directly down over top of the ruler, holding my knife, just to make marks. Marking the dough, then removing the ruler and then you can slice it, put it on your baking sheet, and get it into the oven. They bake for about 12 minutes. They should take on a little bit of color around the edges and they'll pop up slightly. But they should bake perfectly at that 12 minute mark. You can go ahead and take them out of the oven, let them cool completely, and then enjoy. They store really well at room temperature in an airtight container for a few days. 25. Piped: Spritz Dough : The most popular piped dough is spritz and it also happens to be one of my favorite from when I was a little girl. Now, you can use a piping tip and piping bag to pipe these or you can use a cookie press. There's a few different brands that make cookie presses and they're super fun to use especially if you have kids, but you don't need a cookie press. I'm going to show you not only how to make the dough, but how to use a piping bag and piping tips. Let's talk about the basic dough recipe. To make the spritz dough, we're going to be using the creaming method. So we want to get our sugars and our fat into the bowl and this is also the time when you want to add your flavorings and your salt and your baking powder. That way, the salt and baking powder will be nice and dispersed throughout the cookies. Now I'm using vanilla and almond flavoring. You don't have to use the almond flavoring, that's definitely optional, but I know a lot of recipes do call for it and it's a nice touch, especially around the holidays. So get those into your bowl and you're going to cream it on medium speed for a couple of minutes. We want to incorporate a little bit of air. Again, these are going to be a little bit lighter, puffy cookies as an end result. So once those are creamed, you can scrape the bowl really well, add in your applesauce and your milk. I'm using almond milk, but you can use any type of plant-based milk. You want to get those mixed in really well, good and combined, making sure that it's not looking really curdled or separated. Once that's mixed in, you want to add in the flour and the dough is really going to come together at this point. You'll notice, once you get the flour in there and get it incorporated, that the dough is pretty firm, but it's still a good piping consistency. If for some reason, the dough seems really tough and you don't think you would be able to pipe it, you can add a little bit more milk. Sometimes certain flours have higher protein contents, different brands, and with this dough, you really want to make sure that you can pipe it. I will tell you though that when you go to pipe it, it may seem tough but it is still pretty firm and you will have to apply a little bit of pressure. But you definitely don't want to water down the dough or add too much liquid so that it comes out runny, can't be piped and can't hold its shape in the oven. Once you've got the dough mixed though, you can go ahead and get ready to pipe right away. 26. Piped: Spritz Piping : I love piping cookie dough. It's one of my favorite things to do. I love to get all of my tips out in front of me, get my cookie dough ready, piping bag, all the toppings that I want to use, get it on a table or the counter, get a nice comfy chair, and just try to come up with new designs and techniques and combinations. It's a lot of fun and I usually take my time doing this. So as you are decorating with these cookies, that's definitely something to just try out, get all your tools ready together and have fun. But I'm going to show you a few of my favorite ways to pipe these cookies. Now generally, there's four motions that I do. The first motion is going to be holding a tip directly above the surface, applying pressure, and then just stopping pressure and pulling away. The second technique I use is holding the tip again directly above the surface, perpendicular to the surface of my cookie tray, applying pressure, and then turning the bag either clockwise or counterclockwise, but holding that central position and then stopping pressure and pulling away. The third technique I like to use is a rosette technique. So we're actually going to be holding the piping bag directly above the surface, starting to apply pressure, and then moving in a clockwise or counterclockwise motion, coming back to where you started, stopping pressure and pulling off to the side. Then the final one I like to use is just either left to right or right to left, depending on if you're right or left-handed, whichever direction is more comfortable for you to move in, doing just sideways motion while applying pressure, and then stopping and pulling away. This is great to use for wide flat tips that have the ridges. So you can get all kinds of fun designs. Now you can also use your finger or your thumb to push down in the center of the cookies to create a nice space to put in sprinkles, chocolate chips, or nuts like I'm using. You can also bake these cookies and then after they come out of the oven, you can put a glaze into those little indents like a thumbprint cookie. So you definitely have different options. Also, you saw how to dip the almond horn cookies. If you wanted to dip some of these cookies in chocolate or do a chocolate drizzle over the top of them, you can even dip them and then dip them in a topping. I mean, there's a lot. What I love about it is that it's one dough. You can have a few different pipping tips, but you can come up with so many different designs. People will think that you spent all this time making all of these cookies, but it was really just one cookie dough. So the tips that I used in this lesson that you saw the demonstrations of are provided in the recipe for the sprint's dough cookie. So you can find them there if you want to get any of those tips. But otherwise, you could just start out with something simple. I do generally like to use large open tips simply because these smaller tips aren't going to give you enough bulk and make a really nice sized cookie. As your piping it, you might have to add more motion or apply more pressure and they don't come out as smooth and as nice of a finish as if you're using those larger piping tips. The other nice thing about this dough is that if your piping and you don't like what it looks like after you're done pipping, you can always take the dough and put it right back into your bag and just pipe with it again. It's not going to hurt it at all. You can keep trying out different things until you get what you like. But when you do have all of your cookies piped, you can put them pretty close together on your baking sheet. They don't really spread that much in the oven. You want to get them into your preheated oven. Now when you're ready to take your cookies out of the oven, what you're looking for is that the edges of the cookies have taken on a little bit of color. Now I do want to mention that when you're piping the cookies, you do want to think about piping them all the same size or relatively the same size because if your piping really large cookies on one side of your tray and really small cookies on the other side, they're not going to bake at the same amount of time. So you want to make sure they're pretty uniform. But when they're ready to come out, you're going to see a little bit of color, golden brown color on the edges. Then you want to make sure that when you look at the center of the cookie, it doesn't look like raw dough, it looks nice and flat and uniform on the top and really look down in the center of that cookie. If it's opaque or off white or grayish or anything like that, they're not done, give them another minute. These cookies do bake a little bit more after you take them out of the oven. So that's something also to keep in mind. You don't want to over bake them, they will get a little bit crispy. But get them out of the oven, let them cool completely, especially if you're going to be dipping them in chocolate or something like that, you want to make sure that they are completely cool. Once they are, you can go ahead and enjoy these cookies and they keep really well in an airtight container for a few days. These cookies actually have a little bit longer of a shelf life. So give them a try and I'll see you in the next lesson. 27. Roll-out: Gingerbread Dough : You may be pretty familiar with gingerbread cookies or gingerbread dough. But one of the things that I really love to do with gingerbread dough is make gingerbread linzer. This is a really nice combo because all of the spices that are in gingerbread actually go really well with fruit fillings. Around the holidays, especially when gingerbread is most common, it's great to have that burst of fruit filling when you least expect it. When you make gingerbread dough, you want them to hold a really nice shape, whether you're making gingerbread people, or in this case, we're doing linzer, they need to not spread a bunch in the oven. They need to retain that original shape. So by melting the shortening, we know that we're getting the appropriate amount of flour added into our dough that's going to keep it from spreading out any more in the oven. If you used the solid shortening, then you would add so much flour, get your dough, roll it out. It would seem great. But then, once you put it in the oven, the shortening is going to melt once it hits that heat, and the cookies are going to spread even more. But when we melt the shortening ahead of time, we already know that that's the maximum amount of liquid that we're going to have in the dough. That's really important that you do melt it. If you don't, then these cookies are going to spread in the oven. It's an important step not to skip. But other than that, once you've got your shortening melted, you can go ahead and get all of your ingredients into your mixing bowl, except for your flour. Now you don't have to do this with an electric mixer. You can definitely do it by hand. It's not a complicated dough. Get it all really nice and combined, make sure that you're mixing it well so that your spices are evenly dispersed. We do have a lot of spices in this dough. Then you can add in your flour, and just make sure that it's fully mixed and nice and combined. If the dough does seem a little bit soft at this point, don't worry because we're going to be using a decent amount of flour to roll out these cookies and cut them out. So go ahead and get your dough ready, set it aside, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 28. Roll-out: Linzer: Now we get to make our loser cookies. I absolutely love these cookies and I think they're so pretty. You can use round cutters, you can use square cutters, you can use cutters that have ridges on them. Whatever you already have is just fine. I'm using a medium sized round cutter and one that's a little bit smaller to get that inner circle, if you don't have that just use a sharp paring knife. Cut out your large piece and then cut out a window in the center. That'll do just fine. Even if you don't have any cookie cutters, you can just create even a template out of card stock or paper or anything like that and lay it down on your dough to create a pattern or create your own cookie cutter and just use a knife to cut it out. That works just fine. Now I'm using a huckleberry jam because that's what I have on hand. But you can go ahead and use any type of berry jam. They all go really great with this dough. You can also try like cranberry marmalade, an orange marmalade would even be good, something that has the right flavor profile to go with the spices in the dough, but you can even mix it up and try different fillings. What's really nice is you can cut out all of your cookies and then just have a few different jams or fillings to put them in there and have a really nice array of cookies. But what we want do is get our surface floured. This dough has a tendency to stick. You want make sure that you've got your rolling pin out and ready to go. Also have your baking sheet with parchment paper or non-stick baking mat off to the side and you can preheat your oven at this point. These cookies are going to bake at 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Now when you roll out the dough, you're looking for it to be about a quarter inch thick. It doesn't matter the length or the width or anything like that, you're just looking for the actual thickness of the dough. That's the most important part. You want these cookies to be thick enough so that when you go to pick them up after they're completely cooled, they don't sag or fall apart and you definitely don't want them to over-baken the oven because they are too thin, you don't want them to under-bake because they are too thick. So quarter of an inch is a really good measurement to go with. I like to make sure that I dip my cookie cutters in the flour before I cut through the dough. Because if you don't, then the dough has a tendency to stick to the cookie cutter and then you don't get really nice, clean cut. So you can go ahead and cut out a bunch of the bottom pieces and then to get the top piece, you're going to cut out a circle and then cut a smaller circle out of the center of it. I like to cut a few buttons and then a few tops and make sure that you have enough dough to finish all of your cookies. Before you fill them, maybe cut out all of your rounds, count them up, and then split that number in half to make sure that you have a top and bottom for all of your cookies. But once you get the bottoms, go ahead and add some jam on top trying to keep it towards the center, leaving a little space around the edges so that our top ring is going to attach nicely. You can just use your finger and a little bit of water running around the edge of that dough and then put the ring on top to attach it. Once you've got those onto your baking sheet, they don't spread a whole lot, so you don't need to leave a lot of room in between each cookie. I like to run a little bit of water along the top of the cookie as well to break down that flour. Because if you have too much flour on the cookies, it won't bake off in the oven and it might still be there after the cookie is baked, which doesn't always give the nicest look and gives an odd mouthfeel getting all that extra flour. It hydrates that and gets rid of some of that flour. But also then I sprinkle it with a little bit of sugar and that water helps the sugar attach. Once is ready to go into the oven, they're going to bake for about 12 minutes and you're looking for the cookies are going to start to get little tiny hairline cracks along the top. So you want to make sure that you're getting it to that point. Because if not, then the tendency is that the center of the bottom cookie doesn't get fully baked because it's got all that jam on top of it. We don't want it to be rolling. We want the cookies to fully bake so that they have enough stability. As soon as you start to see those little crack starting to form on the top and the top edge starts to spread all out slightly, they're ready to come out of the oven. Now these cookies, I always say, let them cool completely at room temperature, you totally can, but these cookies are also really good, warm, so it's up to you. But they store well at room temperature in a nice airtight container for a few days. 29. Roll-out: Sugar Dough : In this lesson, we're going to to take a look at a roll out sugar cookie dough. This dough is such a good staple recipe to have because you can use it for any occasion or holiday, as you go to sugar cookie roll out dough. You can roll it out and cut out all kinds of shapes and decorate them how ever you want for anytime of the year. You can also add different flavorings to it, like different extracts. You can try adding zest to it, different types of spices. Because typically you're going to put frosting on the cookies. So anything you put in the cookie will be covered up by the frosting. It's always fun to bite into a sugar cookie and you get a flavor you didn't expect. Let's get started making the dough. We're using a basic cut-in method for this dough. It's really simple. You can use a fork or a spoon and a medium-size bowl to make the dough. No fancy equipment necessary. Your dry ingredients are going to go right into the bowl and then the fat is going to go in, and we're going to cut it into the dry ingredients. You can use any type of vegetable shortening that you like to use. There is going to be flavoring in there, we're using vanilla extract. But something to keep in mind is that the dough itself doesn't have a whole lot of flavor. If you want to use something like a vegan butter or vegan buttery sticks that have a little bit more flavor like that of butter, then this would be a good place to use one of those alternatives to just a plain vegetable shortening. But get those cut in and it should look like a course meal. You don't want any big pieces of shortening or vegan butter leftover before you add in your wet ingredients. We're going to mix it. You can use your spoon or whatever you are mixing utensil is just until it starts to come together. Then I like to use my hands to get in there and pull the dough together. Now this dough does not need to rest, you can use it right away to roll out and cut out your cookies. 30. Roll-out: Rolling Sugar Cookies: Now we get to do the fun part, which is choosing your cookie cutters and rolling out the dough and cutting out the cookies. I love this because there are so many cookie cutters available on the market. I'm using a unicorn cookie cutter that I found online. I really love that one. It's about a four-inch cookie cutter. This is a good dough for those larger decorated sugar cookies. Now, if you don't have a cookie cutter, you can easily, using some thick paper or some cardboard, create your own template, and then just use a sharp paring knife to cut around the template when you place it on the dough. That will work just as well. But what we want to do is gather our tools. You're going to need a rolling pin or something to roll out the dough with. You want a little bowl of flour because we're going to be dusting our surface and dusting the rolling pin in the top of the dough just so we're not getting any stickage. You will also have your cookie sheets lined with parchment paper or a non-stick baking mat ready to go. I like to take small pieces of the dough, maybe about a quarter of the dough at a time, and mold it into a disk and then start to roll it out. I usually work from the center towards the edges. I like to check and make sure by lifting up my dough and turning it as I'm rolling it out to make sure that there's no dough sticking to my work surface. If you need to add more flour, we'll make sure that your wet surface is pretty well floured, so that these do not stick at all because if they do stick and you go and try to cut them out, they're not going to come up off your work surface. They're going to create a really unstable cookie, and we don't want that. Once you have it rolled out, you want to make sure that these are at least a quarter inch thick. It's really important because once you start adding on the glaze and any more decorations, it needs to be a pretty sturdy cookie. Now, the cookie dough itself is pretty tender to eat. It's not firm or gross in any way. You definitely need it to be thick enough so that it doesn't break under the weight of any decorations. Make sure you're rolling it thick enough. Then I like to dip my cookie cutter into the flour before I cut, then that way the cookie dough doesn't stick to my cookie cutter either. You get a really nice clean edge when you cut through the dough. Now, I just basically cut them out with a roll out of my dough and then remove the scraps and just transfer my cut-out cookies over to my baking sheet. But if you feel more comfortable, go ahead and use a spatula to carefully transfer the cookies. Another nice thing to do is to roll out your cookie dough straight onto your cookie sheet or even onto parchment paper. Cut out your cookies pretty close together, and then remove the scraps and then just move that parchment paper onto your cookie sheet, then that way you don't have to worry about misforming them or anything when you are getting them onto that baking sheet. Now, depending on the size of cookie cutter that you choose, these are going to go into a 325 degree Fahrenheit oven. The larger cookies baked from anywhere 8-10 minutes, they're not going to take on a whole lot of color. You don't want them to get really brown because they can over-bake easily, and because we're using a little bit more flour, they will dry out. You want to keep an eye on them. They should not look opaque in the center. They should look very uniform in color when you take them out of the oven, but definitely not too dark. Now if you're making much smaller cookies, they may only go for seven or eight minutes, so keep an eye on them, check them, add a minute or take a minute off as you are baking them. This dough, once you pull the scraps away, it's okay to go ahead and put those scraps back into your remaining dough, pull off another piece, and keep working with it. Even though you added some flour to that dough, you can still use it. Now, as you roll out all of the dough, if you're getting to the very little bitty end of it and you feel like it's really dry, then you might not want to use that part of the dough because we have added so much flour to it at that point. You can go ahead and just get rid of that part of the dough. But otherwise, once you finish rolling out, cutting out, and baking all of your cookies, you want to make sure that they cool completely. I like to let them cool, at least for a few hours. You want to make sure that they don't have any heat in them whatsoever when you go to decorate them because it will make them fall apart. 31. Roll-Out: Sugar Cookie Glazing: The glaze that I make for my sugar cookies is incredibly simple. We're just taking powdered sugar and some type of liquid, mixing them together until we get the correct consistency. I'm using a pretty decent amount of powdered sugar and I'm using organic powdered sugar. Then you can add milk or water, you can add lemon juice, orange juice. You have a few different options here, and it doesn't really affect the outcome other than flavor. Typically I just like to add a plant-based milk such as almond milk and some vanilla flavoring since most of the time I'm going for a more of a design look, something with colors and sprinkles so I just want a nice vanilla base. But it's entirely up to you. The glaze is super easy and versatile. You do want to use a whisk when you're making your glaze to ensure that there aren't any clumps of powdered sugar leftover and you get a really nice smooth finish. What I like to do when I'm mixing my glaze is get my liquid in there and then if I feel like it looks too thin, I can add some more powdered sugar, if I feel like it looks too thick, I can add a little more liquid. It really is a balancing act. The recipe that I give you is a really good starting point but there are different factors depending on what type of flavoring you're using, what type of milk you're using, or if you're using water, so you just want to look for consistency as opposed to perfect amounts of your ingredients. We want this to be pretty thick. So if your glaze is too thin, it's all going to run off the cookies. If it's too thick, then your cookies could break or pull apart as you're dipping them. A good test that I use is when I lift my whisk up out of the glaze and the glaze falls back down, if it takes about 5-7 seconds for the glaze to disappear back into itself, it's a really good consistency. Now I'm using plant-based gel colors to mix in my colors. If you're using some type of powder, you may want to mix it with water to create a liquid out of it before you add it into your glaze just to do the marbling effect. Now if you're not doing a marbling effect and you just want to use pure colors or color your icing all one color, then go ahead and add in your powder or your gel color whatever you are using. Another fun tip is that if you make your glaze even thicker, you can actually pipe with it. Now it's not going to hold up really sturdy decorations, but you can create some fun outlines or small line details or even dots on your cookies if you get it thick enough. You can try different techniques and really spruce up your cookies however you like. But I love this marble effect, it's especially cute on the unicorn cookies. I'm just dropping in a couple drops of, I have a red plant-based gel color and I have a blue plant-based gel color. I'm just dropping in a couple of each into the top of my glaze and swirling it slightly. When you dip your cookies into the glaze, you're going to want the side that was facing up on your cookie sheet to be the side that gets glaze because that's going to be the smooth side. If you flip them over the side that was touching the parchment paper or the baking sheet, that tends to have sharp edges on it so when you glaze it, it's not going to have as finish of a look. You want to make sure that your glazing the tops of your cookies and not the bottom. The top of the cookies are going to go into the glaze. Now you can dip it all the way to the bottom edge or you can just dip the top, just know that some of that glaze is going to run down the sides as it sets up. I like to use a cookie drying sheet or cookie cooling rack to set my cookies on once I dip them. If you put them on just a flat surface, then the glaze is going to pull around the edges of the cookies. Now if you don't have a cooling rack, you can also create, maybe set your cookies on top of a cup that's flipped upside down, something that has enough of a surface area to add stability to your cookie but it's not going to go out to the very edges of your cookie so that that glaze has an area to drain off of. But once you dip all of your cookies, you want to set them aside and let them dry, and this takes a few hours. The hardest part is waiting but if you do wait, this glaze actually dries firm, so that that way if you want to package them up or wrap them up, the glaze won't be damaged if you let it dry completely and don't worry, they're not going to dry out and become inedible. They're still delicious because the glaze actually locks the moisture into the cookies and there is going to be a small layer of what glaze underneath the outside crust so they're still really good, fresh cookies. Once these are completely done, I like to keep them, you can keep them in air-tight container, you can wrap them up individually and they're good for a few days. Now, you can glaze them and then once they are set up, you can do even more things with these. You can, like I said, you can pipe on them, you can add some edible glitters. If the glaze is still wet, you can even add different color glazes and marble directly on the cookie. You have a lot of different things to try out. While the glaze is still wet you could also add sprinkle borders. The possibilities are endless and there are so many fun ideas online of cookie decorations so try them out. If I see something that I like or I get some inspiration, I think in layers, like how could I turn that into a cookie? What would be the glaze layer that I want to put down? Do I need to let that dry and then paint on it or pipe on top of it or how would I add in these details? There's a lot that you can do, you just want to plan out the design before you get started, but try out different things and have fun. 32. Freezing Cookies: We're nearing the end of the course, and I really hope you guys have enjoyed it up to this point. In this lesson, I just wanted to take a moment to talk to you about planning ahead with cookies. Now one of the things that I really love about using cookies for a dessert at events or even in a large commercial setting, cookies are fantastic because they freeze so well. The key is is that you want it frees the cookie dough and not baked cookies. Baked cookies in the freezer will dry out the moment they freeze. Trust me, I never bake cookies and then put them in the freezer. But a lot of the time, I make my cookie dough, portion it out, and then put it in the freezer, because guess what? When you want fresh cookies, you have frozen cookie dough. Just pull it out, put it in the oven, and you have fresh baked cookies anytime you want. Now, a couple tips. If you're doing drop type cookies, you can go ahead and make your cookie dough, portion out all of your cookies, you can put them nice and snug up against each other onto a cookie sheet, put the whole sheet in your freezer. Once they're completely frozen, put them in a storage bag or a couple storage bags just to keep the freezer burn out, and then anytime you want those cookies, pop them on your cookie sheet, pop on the oven and you're going to have fresh cookies. Roll out cookies, freeze really well, if you put them side by side on your baking tray, put your sheet into the freezer, and then as those are freezing, you can continue rolling out your cookies, pull the cookies out of the freezer, lay down a piece of parchment paper for protection and then put another layer on top, and you can continue to layer them, you just want to make sure that the cookies on the bottom have firmed up enough in the freezer, so that they're not going to squish when you had more weight to them. But you can continue to layer them, and then as they're completely frozen, you can just nicely layer them into again a freezer bag, or a couple of freezer bags to keep out a freezer burn. You could do this with molded cookies as well. Really, any type of cookie freezes perfectly, and you can freeze them for up to a month. Now if you have a deep freezer, that goes even lower in temperature, you can freeze them for up to six months. I do want to point out though, that if you are deep freezing them, it helps to pull them out far in the refrigerator slightly, or else you might have some difficulty baking them, because you're going from such extreme temperatures, and the inside of the cookie is not going to bake at the same rate as the outside of the cookie. From a regular freezer, you can just put them in the oven, that will be fine. But if you're deep freezing them at a really low temperature, it helps to thaw them slightly before baking. Now, when would you use this technique? Well in commercial baking, typically, they make large batches, I mean you're talking about a 90 court and mixer that's making a 300 cookie batch. Bakeries don't typically make those every morning or daily. A lot of the time, bakers will make those large batches, scoop all the cookies out, and then put them in the freezer, and then another baker will come in and bake off all those cookies every morning. So you have freshly baked cookies, but it's typically from a large frozen batch. Now, this is great and useful around holiday time. If you tend to make a lot of cookies for the holidays, you can start prepping your cookie doughs way ahead of time and freeze them. So then during the holidays, if say, you're going to a party one weekend and another, the next weekend, then you have all your cookies already prepped, all you have to do is pull them out, bake them, decorate them, and package them up. It's really that simple. So try it out for yourself, if you don't believe me. Go ahead, freeze them cookies and then bake them fresh and see what you think. I think it's a really efficient way to create a lot of cookies, and to create a wide variety of cookies for any special occasion or any day of the week. 33. Thank You: Well, congrats on finishing this course. I really hope you feel like now you have a lot of confidence and you can take on any cookie recipe in the future. That was my hope when I created this intensive cookie course. There is a lot of information. If you have any questions, don't understand something or you feel like something could be explained better, please do send me a message or post a discussion, so that I can help you better understand how to bake some delicious vegan cookies. Don't forget that the recipes and supplements for the course are available on the resources in projects page. Also check out the project and share what you're working on in your own kitchen. All right, guys. Thanks so much for joining me. I hope you enjoyed it. Take care.