The 13 Greatest Vacation Cookie Baking Instruments of 2024, Examined & Reviewed

Whether or not tucked right into a tin for neighbors, artfully organized at a cookie swap, or left on a plate for Santa, cookies are a mainstay of the vacation season. Roll-and-cut classics like Gingerbread Cookies or Rolled Sugar Cookie Cutouts are pleasant to brighten, and sandwich cookies like nutty Raspberry Linzer Cookies or gooey-sweet Alfajores Con Cajeta burst with taste from their decadent fillings.

Regardless of if you happen to make the identical tried-and-true household recipes each vacation season or department out into new territory, you want the perfect cookie baking gear to realize the perfect outcomes. Fortunately, our crew has spent a whole lot of hours testing baking tools to search out the perfect instruments to measure, combine, portion, bake, and enhance cookies with ease and precision. Think about an improve out of your battered cookie sheets or struggling mixer and spend money on just a few useful gadgets that may make your cookie baking marathons far more streamlined and fulfilling this vacation season. With these instruments in your arsenal (a lot of that are fairly reasonably priced!), your cookies will likely be as enjoyable and straightforward to make as they’re to eat.

Unsurprisingly, we’re #teamkitchenscale right here at Critical Eats. Particularly once you’re baking, a kitchen scale will guarantee essentially the most correct measurements of components, with the added bonus of reducing method down on cleanup—you may weigh every ingredient proper into the blending bowl with out the necessity to soiled a bunch of measuring cups. (Nonetheless, if you happen to do desire measuring by quantity, we advocate utilizing one among our examined and permitted measuring cups.) Streamline your vacation cookie baking and guarantee constant outcomes each time with our successful scale by OXO. It includes a pull-out show that makes it simple to learn, even with extra-large mixing bowls on high, and its power-saving standby mode holds onto the latest weight measurement for a full quarter-hour in case you must step away.

Once you’re measuring out components and mixing collectively cookie dough, you’ll want a set of roomy, sturdy mixing bowls. Metallic bowls are lighter and simpler to retailer than glass and are the popular bowl materials of most Critical Eats staffers. This no-frills set by Vollrath is favored by restaurant professionals (and by us in our evaluate!) and has 5 broad, shallow bowls that permit for straightforward stirring, mixing, and pouring. They’re tremendous low-cost and can final a lifetime.

Many cookie recipes begin with creaming collectively butter and sugar till mild and fluffy. Achieve this with ease utilizing our successful hand mixer by Breville, which has rubber-coated beaters that scrape the perimeters of the bowl to combine cookie dough successfully, powerfully, and remarkably quietly. This mixer is comfy to carry and has plenty of useful extras, like a digital show with a built-in timer, a pause button, a light-weight that shines into the blending bowl, and a snap-on case for storing the attachments and rope.

In case you bake cookies usually or in massive portions, chances are you’ll need to improve from a hand mixer to a stand mixer. Spend money on the perfect with this secure and highly effective mannequin by KitchenAid. Its seven-quart capability and well-designed attachments permit it to deal with massive and small batches, and its silicone-lined paddle is ideal for scraping and mixing sticky cookie dough. In case you solely bake cookies through the holidays, take into account our choose for informal bakers, the extra reasonably priced KitchenAid Artisan Sequence 5-Quart Tilt-Head Stand Mixer.

For portioning balls of cookie dough (or meatballs! or falafel!), no kitchen must be with out a portion scoop. Additionally referred to as dishers or cookie scoops, these scoops make portioning sticky dough quicker, neater, and completely constant from cookie to cookie. This red-handled #24 scoop from Winco doles out three tablespoons at a time, good for medium- to large-sized cookies, and the purple-handled #40 scoop is nice for petite initiatives at 1.5 tablespoons per scoop.

In case you’re rolling dough for cut-out cookies, you’ll want a wonderfully even thickness. Thick and skinny spots create cookies that may bake at completely different charges—and also you’ll threat a few of them burning on the baking sheet whereas others are underbaked. In case you’ve struggled to realize stage, constant slabs of dough up to now, do this dowel-style rolling pin. Easy in design however tremendous efficient, this pin rolled out essentially the most even dough of the bunch in our testing of rolling pins. Favor a French-style tapered pin? Mais oui! The J.Okay. Adams FRP-1 Maple French Rolling Pin additionally carried out superbly in our testing.

Lining your baking sheet with parchment paper not solely supplies a floor that even the sugariest cookie dough received’t stick with, but it surely additionally helps to forestall scorching and makes cleanup fast and straightforward. Save your self the frustration of tearing off uneven strips of rolled-up parchment and improve to pre-cut, rectangular parchment paper sheets which might be completely sized to suit a half-sheet baking pan. These heavy-duty silicone-coated sheets from King Arthur Baking Firm may be reused just a few occasions—good info if you happen to’re involved about waste.

This handy two-pack of our successful baking sheet will maintain you cranking out a number of batches of cookies. In our testing of baking sheets, cookies got here out persistently golden brown and evenly baked utilizing these sturdy pans, and their rolled rims had been simple and comfy to grip and maintain onto. They’re fairly moderately priced, too. (Bonus: Add a snap-on lid and retailer your cookies proper on the baking sheet!)

If you wish to skip utilizing parchment paper however nonetheless have your cookies launch cleanly from the pan, take into account a nonstick baking sheet. In our exams, cookies baked on the Cuisinart pan got here out evenly golden brown and slid off simply. The cookies did end up a smidge darker than these baked on lighter coloured pans, so test on the sooner facet of the baking vary to ensure they’re completely baked.

As soon as your beautiful cookies come out of the oven, they’ll want a spot to land and funky off. In our testing of cooling racks, cookies chilled rapidly on this rack with out warping, and spatulas slid effortlessly over it with out snagging. The dearth of middle help in its design additionally made the rack simpler to scrub, a giant win in our books. It was the most affordable wire rack we examined—get just a few if you happen to’re making plenty of cookies!

To embellish cookies with icing, seize a set of those small piping baggage. They’re referred to as tipless baggage since you don’t want a piping tip to make use of them. Many cookie decorators will merely snip off the very finish and that offers sufficient precision to stipulate even essentially the most sophisticated cookie shapes. In case you do want to use a tip with them, attain for a Wilton or Ateco element spherical tip in measurement 2 or 3, good for piping borders of thick royal icing on cookies earlier than flooding them with a thinner icing.

In case you’re spreading frosting or ganache excessive of your cookies or a filling sandwiched in between them, a small offset spatula is far more efficient than a butter knife. It’s additionally nice for shimmying underneath rolled-out sugar cookie dough to switch cutouts to a baking sheet or to raise delicate cookies off of the sheet after baking. This 4.5-inch mini offset spatula from Ateco is nimble, versatile, and cheap.

For essentially the most vibrant colours of frosting and icing, put down these bottles of liquid meals coloring from the grocery retailer and spend money on what the professionals use. Gel pastes are ultra-concentrated, so just a few drops are all you want for vivid coloration, and this set by AmeriColor has a pleasant vary of hues. 

FAQs 

What’s the distinction between a cookie sheet and a baking sheet?

A flat, rimless cookie sheet has one very quick, angled edge and is open on its different three sides. A rimmed baking sheet is a flat pan with one-inch edges on all sides, and is mostly an ordinary measurement (for instance, a half-sheet pan is eighteen inches lengthy and 13 inches broad). Whereas a cookie sheet is okay to make use of for baking cookies, it’s restricted in different functions. We advocate investing in a extra versatile rimmed baking sheet as a substitute, which might additionally roast greens, bake a sheet cake, or accommodate a complete dinner’s price of meals.

Is it higher to bake cookies on parchment paper or a silicone baking mat?

We advocate baking cookies on parchment paper versus silicone. Silicone impacts how warmth is carried out to the dough, and its nonstick floor permits for extra unfold, inflicting the cookies to turn out to be dense and greasy with a touch of bitterness from extreme browning. Save your silicone baking mat for sticky initiatives like making nut brittles or syrupy granolas.

Can I freeze cookie dough?

Most cookie doughs freeze nicely if you wish to break up your vacation cookie baking into levels or get pleasure from smaller batches of fresh-baked cookies on demand. Portion your cookies as directed onto wax or parchment paper, then fold them into packets and place them into zip-top baggage. The cookie dough parts may be refrigerated for as much as every week or frozen for 3 to 6 months. It’s a good suggestion to label the baggage with the dough kind, the date you made it, and the baking directions in order that they’re simple to bake off rapidly or give away for others to bake and revel in.

Why We’re the Specialists

• Afton Cyrus is a meals blogger, recipe developer, culinary teacher, and freelance meals author and editor with a ardour for baking. She spent eight years as a check prepare dinner and editor at America’s Take a look at Kitchen earlier than changing into a contributor to Critical Eats in 2023. Since then, she has reviewed hand mixers, liquid measuring cups, fondue pots, and stress canners.
• Her recipes and meals writing seem on-line for Critical Eats, King Arthur Baking Firm, and different retailers, and in print in award-winning and New York Instances-bestselling cookbooks for America’s Take a look at Kitchen and Ten Pace Press.
• At Critical Eats, we usually revisit our examined evaluations to make sure our findings stay present.