Monkey Chocolate

Cookie

When you were a kid, you probably enjoyed baking cookies with your mom. For some, the big deal was helping put the ingredients in the bowl. For others, it was licking the beaters, getting the last bit of dough from the bowl or just plain eating some of the cookie dough. And some are too busy playing to even enter the kitchen until the warm cookies come out of the oven. Warm cookies, cold milk...that's Cookie Monster's cookie heaven! And who can argue with that?

Going Beyond the Chocolate Chip Cookie

By far, the most popular cookie is the chocolate chip cookie. But let us not forget that there are a multitude of other cookies out there worth mentioning. The best homemade cookies (besides chocolate chip) are cookies like peanut butter cookies, snickerdoodles and sugar cookies. Those are the ones you hope to find in your cookie jar at home anyway. Bakeries tend to do a good job with these too.

Store-bought cookies are never as good as home-baked, but some of the more popular versions of our home-baked favorites are Chips Ahoy and Nutter Butter. The hardest store-bought cookie to imitate at home is an Oreo. Even the generic store brands of this classic aren't quite as good as the original Oreo (with Double-Stuff, please).

These days, Nestle, Otis Spunkmeyer and Pillsbury have made it a lot easier to bake cookies. They sell their cookie dough pre-made in the form of bars or tubes of cookie dough. Some even have the cookie dough already rolled into balls and ready to pop onto the cookie sheet. Just pop as many as you want in the oven for fresh, hot-baked cookies anytime. Of course, you can do this with your own favorite cookie recipe as well by mixing up a batch of the dough, forming it into balls and freezing it. It's certainly a more economical way to enjoy fresh-baked cookies anytime!

Another thing the pre-made cookie dough is good for is making a large cookie crust that you can top with any variety of things. You can decorate a large chocolate chip or sugar cookie to make a cookie cake, or you can use a large sugar cookie as the base for a fruit pizza. You can even take pre-made chocolate chip or peanut butter cookie dough, form it into little cups in a mini-muffin tin and drop a Hershey kiss in the center to make Kiss Cups.

Whatever you do, be creative and most of all, have fun!

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