Storing Unbaked Cookie Dough

[JeanneCake]

I made cookie dough a week ago Thursday (9 days ago); I never got to bake it due to revising work schedules. Usually I make cookies the day after I make the dough, but it's still sitting in the cooler. It's just the usual: creamed butter and sugar, a little salt, flour, vanilla, eggs and a few TBL of milk. I've never kept unbaked dough this long and I'm wondering if I should go in tomorrow (it's been a long week and I want tomorrow off!!) and bake or just forget it and - well, I don't really want to toss this. But I also don't want to bake off batches of cookies (which I will be decorating with colored chocolate rather than royal icing) and have them be awful either. I roll it out between sheets of full size parchment and put two or three on a full size sheet pan; I covered the sheet pan entirely with plastic wrap.

Whadda think?

[miladyinsanity]

By cooler, you mean fridge not freezer?

FWIW, I've done this and it didn't seem to affect the cookies adversely. But they were icebox cookies. I've not done this with drop cookies.

[etalanian]

I don't think you will have a problem, as long as your fridge keeps things nice and cold. If you were using unbleached flour, the dough may have turned grey. Other than that, you should be okay.

Why not take out a bit of dough first, roll it out, and bake a cookie or two to taste them?

Eileen

Edited March 19, 2007 by etalanian (log)

[sugarseattle]

i'm sure they will be just fine, as long as the dough hasn't gone grey as mentioned above. I would just slip them into the freezer. I keep all sorts of dough in the freezer for as long as 6 months...I've got these orange shortbread thins I keep finding more of in my freezer and they bake up fine. I can't even remember WHEN I made that dough???!!!

[JeanneCake]

Hi all.. they were fine. I am baking for a new account and wanted them to be perfect. We have very limited freezer space at work so I can't put my sheet pans in the freezer when I'm done rolling out the dough so unfortunately freezing stuff is not an option for me (I share space with a caterer). Makes for a tough production schedule.

[helenjp]

Don't know about butter cookies, but somewhere I read that honey/spice cookies like lebkuchen are made with or used to be made with aged dough.

So of course I had to experiment.

I think some of the doughs were held over for months in chilly German cellars, but mine certainly lasted 2-3 weeks in late autumn/pre-Christmas, and handled and baked much better than "fresh" dough - the sticky tendency of the dough had turned into a very easy to handle flexible, plastic texture, and they baked crisp.