Make Refrigerated Cookie Dough Cookies Look Like Fresh Bakery Cookies

While I’m a huge fan of baking cookies from scratch, sometimes I don’t feel like actually baking but I still want a freshly baked cookie. I’ll admit that the pre-made refrigerated cookie dough has found it’s way into my shopping cart a few times to fulfill that “freshly baked cookie” craving, without having to pull out the mixing bowls. And while I might want to serve guests or friends freshly baked cookies, sometimes I don’t have the time to bake them from scratch. Once again, the pre-made refrigerated cookie dough comes to the rescue.

However, just because you baked the cookies from a pre-made dough doesn’t mean they have to look that way. I stumbled across this amazing trick for how to make picture perfect cookies, by Not Your Momma’s Cookie, and wondered whether it would work just as well for refrigerated cookie dough as it does for a scratch-made cookie. So this afternoon, I decided to give it a shot.

For this experiment, I used Nestle Tollhouse Refrigerated Cookie Dough.

Since this dough already comes pre-portioned, I didn’t roll them into tiny balls, I just pulled each square portion apart.

Then smooshed the pieces back together and placed them on the cookie sheet torn/jagged side up.

For comparison purposes, I made 4 cookies using the “jagged-dough ball” method, or as I like to call it, the “tear and smoosh” method and left 4 cookies as is. Then I baked as usual.

After inspecting the cookies, overall, the “tear and smoosh” method definitely makes the cookies appear more gourmet. They have the little bumps and jaggedness that makes you think “made from scratch.” One of the four was pretty smooth and looked similar to the regular cookies, but that might be because I didn’t make the tear as jagged or rough as it needed to be. Also, the little pre-portioned squares look like they’re quite a bit smaller than what was shown in the original post, so I might not have had as much dough to work with.

I love the “from scratch” look that I was able to get even when using the pre-made refrigerated cookie dough. If you’ve got guests coming and you want “freshly baked cookies” in a pinch, use this method to make your refrigerated cookie dough cookies look like fresh bakery cookies.