Air Fried Chocolate Cookies You'll Love

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Video Summary

Hey everyone! Today I’m making a very basic chocolate chip cookie recipe that I love to store in my freezer so I can have fresh cookies anytime I want. I’m baking just a few cookies today and putting the rest of the dough in the freezer using a method called flash freezing. I walk you through the entire process, starting with mixing two sticks of butter with sugars, adding eggs and vanilla, then incorporating the dry ingredients (salt, baking soda, and flour) all in one bowl because I don’t like extra dishes to clean. I use just one cup of chocolate chips instead of the two cups the recipe calls for because I prefer more cookie dough flavor than chocolate. I share my tip about scooping the dough smaller than I used to because I found larger cookies wouldn’t cook evenly – the outside would be crunchy while the inside stayed doughy. After baking a test batch at 350 degrees, I flash freeze the remaining cookie dough balls on a tray so they don’t stick together, then I’ll transfer them to a bag for easy storage. I even share how you can cook these frozen cookies in an air fryer at a lower temperature if you don’t want to preheat your oven. It’s such a convenient way to always have homemade cookies ready to bake!

Video Transcript

Hey everyone, welcome back to Keep It Simple DIY. I’m Kari. Today we are making a very basic chocolate chip cookie recipe. I like to make chocolate chip cookies to store in my freezer so I can have them convenient anytime, so that’s what I’m going to be doing today. I will be baking up just a few of them and putting the rest in the freezer. So we have already made the dough and I’ll give you a look at it, but let me show you how we made this dough. So let’s go back in time and I will show you putting the dough together.

To start this recipe, I’m going to add two sticks of butter and I’m going to add all the sugars, and then I will mix until combined. The recipe called for cold room temperature butter, so I don’t know what cold room temperature is. I took these out a little bit ago and then I popped in the microwave for a little bit, so I’ve got a little bit room temperature, a little bit kind of melty, and a little bit cold. But you know what? I’ve never had a cookie not work out, so we’re gonna go for it.

Let me add these. I’m going to add a half a cup of sugar and one and a quarter cups of packed brown sugar. I’m going to use dark brown sugar because that’s what I had. I actually keep my sugar in a little bag in my freezer and I have never had my sugar go hard that way. It just seems to keep it super nice, and so that’s how I’ve been doing it and I plan to continue doing it that way. And making a big mess getting this into my jar, into my measuring cup over here. That’s all right. You know what? This is gonna be, it’s just gonna be the rest of it. Sometimes I just go for it.

All right, I’m going to mix these up and then add two eggs while it’s mixing.

All right, you just saw me add two teaspoons of vanilla, and now I’m going to add one teaspoon of salt and one teaspoon of baking soda. I typically don’t mix my dry and wet ingredients separate. I just find that’s more stuff to clean, and I’d prefer to not have to clean if I don’t have to. Okay, going in. And then I’m going to add three cups of flour, and I’m just using a regular all-purpose flour.

All right, I’m going to scrape down everything and let it go just to make sure it fully gets combined, and then we will add the chocolate chips. The recipe calls for two cups. I probably won’t put quite that much in though, because I tend to find cookies to be overly chocolatey. I like the dough a little better than the chocolate. And then our last ingredient is the chocolate chips. How simple is that?

Okay, yeah, I’m adding just about one cup. We’ll see what that looks like. I think there’s gonna be enough chocolate chips with just one cup. Yeah, I bet that’s probably good. Okay, scrape this off. I am going to take this down. Let’s go roll out our cookies.

All right, I’ve already preheated my oven to 350 degrees. It hasn’t quite beeped at me saying it’s ready yet, but I am going to get started by rolling out my cookie dough. And I have a scoop here. Let’s see, does it tell me what size it is? Hmm, this is my middle size scoop. I don’t know, maybe a tablespoon and a half.

I’ve made this recipe before and I use a big scoop so I could get a big like gourmet cookie, and what I realized was I just wouldn’t cook them long enough. The inside would be doughy and the outside would be crunchy. So I’m going with a little bit smaller of a scoop today in hopes that that doesn’t happen again. The recipe was good. It was just I kept having it not be cooked all the way on the inside.

So I’m just going to put six on this tray and then set them aside. I’m actually going to kind of spread them out a little bit. I’m going to set them back on my oven and I will put them in the oven once the oven is preheated.

Clockwork, right? I literally said once the oven is preheated, walked away, and then it beeps. So in these go, and I’m going to set a timer for, I don’t know, let me check that. Okay, I set that timer for 10 minutes. The recipe said 11 to 13, but I am making the cookies a little smaller, so I’m going with 10.

I’m gonna grab another tray that I’m going to put a bunch on to put in my freezer, and I’m going to bring you in close so you can see it in action.

Now these cookies, I am putting them super close together because I’m not going to bake them on this tray. What I’m going to do is I’m going to stick this whole tray in my freezer. I’m going to let them freeze on the tray, and that’s called flash freezing. What that does is it gets them frozen without them sticking to each other. And then once they’re frozen, I’m going to take them off of the tray and then I’m going to put them in a bag in my freezer. And that way I’ll have these little balls that don’t end up sticking together. And then when I want to take some cookies out, I can take any amount, and then I can cook them at 350 degrees, and probably 11 to 13 actually might be closer once they’re frozen for the timing. But realistically we just want to look for them to be golden brown and cooked all the way through.

And something else that I like to do occasionally is cook them in the air fryer. Now the air fryer is a convection oven, and that just means that the air is circulating around differently than it would in a regular oven. That’s not the technical explanation. That’s just a very, very simplified one. And so because of that though, everything does seem to cook a little bit differently in an air fryer. You’d have to have the temperature be significantly less than you would in a regular oven. So instead of like 350, I would probably put them in at like 315 or 320, and then about the same amount of time, maybe like 10 minutes, 10 to 13 minutes, something like that. And so doing that makes them a little bit more rounded instead of flattened out in the air fryer. But on the days that I’m not looking to want to preheat the oven and I just want a quick cookie, that is a great way to go.

All right, and the time it took to get all the cookie dough rolled out, we have about a minute and 45 seconds left until the cookies are ready. I’m going to go pop these in the freezer and then we’ll be taking the cookies out of the oven.

Okay, I’m gonna take these out. I’m gonna give them a little drop. It’ll be a little loud, so I want to explain it first. I’m going to drop them down a little just so they get kind of flat. Well, kind of missed, but that did flatten them out a bit. I don’t really like them being super poofy, so I’m going to let them sit here for a couple minutes and then I will transfer them to a cooling rack. I’m gonna also turn off the oven.

All right, our cookies have cooled for a few minutes and they are perfect. They’re ooey and gooey. Let me show you. They just come apart nicely. And these are actually, I think I prefer this size of cookie because I found that I will eat two cookies or even three cookies every time I eat cookies, no matter how big the cookie is. So in this case, the cookies are smaller, so I won’t be eating as many or as much cookie.

Now I did make mine in a mixer. Of course, if you don’t have a mixer, you could just use a bowl and a spoon or some type of a mixing. Heck, you could use your hand if you really wanted to. I do that with bread dough, so definitely no fancy tools required. But this recipe is so simple, just a standard chocolate chip cookie, and I love having cookies in my freezer so I don’t have to make them for a while.