A few simple tips for making perfect holiday cookies!

Read the entire recipe before you begin. Many times, cookie dough needs to be refrigerated and others might have special instructions you’ll want to know about upfront. This will help you avoid any unwanted time delays when you get ready to bake.

Set up your kitchen like they do on TV. Have all of your ingredients measured out and ready to go before you start mixing. Doing so will allow you to stay organized and you won’t have to worry about missing anything.

If your recipe calls for something to be ‘room temperature’ it needs to be ‘room temperature’. Butter usually needs to be softened before using so it can incorporate easily with the other ingredients. You could microwave butter to soften it but then you risk melting part of it. Best thing is to let the butter sit out on the counter for a few hours before you plan to bake.

If you have made cookies that are either under baked or over baked chances are the sizes of your cookies are not perfectly even. If you have a recipe that makes 2 dozen cookies we recommend portioning out all of the dough into 2 dozen even sized pieces before you bake. Even though this may sound painful, your chances of coming out with the similar size cookies will increase. Better yet, use a portion scoop when you make cookies to get an even size every time you bake.

So, what do you do when the first batch comes out perfect but every batch after gets worse and worse? Answer; refrigerate your dough while it’s waiting to go into the oven. When you leave dough on the counter, the butter in the dough will melt resulting in a flatter cookie which can easily burn. The longer the dough sits out the worse it gets.

And the last tip for perfect holiday cookies is to let the baking pans cool completely before adding the next batch. When the pan is too warm, the butter will unevenly melt in the dough resulting in a browner cookie on the bottom.

I hope these simple tips make this year's holiday cookie baking fun and easy.

Good luck and happy baking!