It’s not too early to start making holiday cookies you can freeze! Here are my tips:

1) Invest in parchment paper to bake your cookies; No grease, no mess, and the cookies come off the baking sheet beautifully. When cooking is finished, scrape off the crumbs from the parchment paper and save the paper for the next meal you cook. I use scrolls over and over again.

2) Make cookies that freeze well, such as biscotti, drop cookies, and other types that don’t require icing.

3) Cookie dough is best made with room temperature ingredients; To get the best results from cookie dough, butter, eggs, fillings and flour should be at room temperature.

4) Freeze cookies in groups of 4 and wrap each group individually; This way you can withdraw the amount you want. Place batches in plastic bags; Mark the date on the bag and freeze flat on the freezer shelf.

5) Bar cookies freeze well; for a cake pan, for example, bake them in a foil-lined pan and let the foil hang over the pan; Once the brownies are baked, simply lift the ends of the foil to remove the brownies without leaving half of them behind! When you’re ready to eat, cut it when you freeze it for a neat, even cut. This also works for a jam-filled bar cookie.

6) Use the correct measuring cups when making cookie dough; Glass measures are for liquids, while metal and plastic are for dry ingredients.

7) Wet your hands frequently while making round ball type cookies; This will help prevent your hands from getting caked with dough.

8) Let the cookie sheets cool between baking so the dough no longer spreads from the heat.

9) When recipes call for extract, make sure the bottle says 100% pure extract; sweeteners are something completely different; It is made mostly of water and artificial substances. Extracts must be made with 35% alcohol.

10) If cooking with convection heat, reduce the oven temperature by 25 degrees; So if the recipe says cook at 350F and you want to use convection, cook at 325F.