Helpful Hints For Molding Cookies
If you are having trouble unmolding your cookie dough…
Be sure you have followed one of the recipes we give. They are formulated to taste good and to work with cookie molds.
When you bake your cookies, be sure to use an ordinary, ungreased baking sheet. The double layered, insulated cookie sheets produce cookies that are cake-ier and that lack detail.
Be sure you chill the dough. This makes it much easier to handle. The one exception is the Chocolate Cookie recipe. Don’t chill it. This is particularly true of the recipe given in the older recipe booklets which call for melted chocolate as an ingredient, rather than coco powder. If you chill this recipe, the dough becomes crumbly. It still bakes up into great tasting rolled cookies, but it will fall apart if you try to make molded cookies.
Using a pastry brush and just a tiny bit of cooking oil lightly oil the mold. Be sure to oil the mold very lightly. I even take a paper towel and wipe out as much of the oil as I can before I flour the mold and tap it to remove the excess. All you want is a thin film of oil. Remember, it is the flour that is acting as the separator, not the oil. If you have too much oil on the mold, it will act as glue, and your dough will definitely stick.
If your dough does stick, clean it out of the mold. Use a dry, stiff brush to scrub it all out, then re-flour your mold, but don’t re-oil it first. The oil from the shortening in the dough will leave enough oil on the mold to hold a film of flour. You will re-flour your mold before each cookie, but you will not re-oil it during a baking session.
Don’t be timid about bopping the edge of the mold. Once you flour your mold and pat in the dough, hold the mold perpendicular to a wooden or plastic cutting board (I prefer plastic), and rap it sharply several times to release the dough. The mold should not break if you are holding it perpendicular to the cutting board. Un-mold the cookie onto your baking sheet, re-flour the mold, and repeat.
To clean your mold at the end of the baking session, scrub it with a vegetable brush in a pan of hot, soapy water, or put it in the dishwasher.
Cut-Apart Cookies
A number of our cookie molds produce several designs each time you un-mold a single, large cookie. We call these Cut-Apart Molds. You can either turn out and bake the large cookie, or you can cut the segments apart before baking. We suggest doing this. Un-mold the dough onto a baking sheet as usual and then carefully slice between the segments with a sharp kitchen knife. Slide the smaller cookies apart to bake. This way, each smaller cookie develops nice, clean, evenly browned boarders, and you wind up with several medium sized cookies, all with different designs each time you un-mold a large cookie.