Starting Up A Cookie Business - A Few Cookie Baking Questions

PollyNibbler

my sister and I are planning to sell cookies on internet,

we are in-home make cookie, our oven is very small, just can bake 4~5 middle size cookie at once.

so we only can take small orders first.

now we have some question and hope anyone can help me, thanks

1. the cookies recipe i use, can make so many cookies at once,

so if i take small order, it must waste many food,

i don't like wasting food but i cannot eat them all..it also a costing ...

i know that i can use half ingredients to make it,

but how to half the weight of the eggs separately???...

2. if i follow the recipe, use whole weight of ingredients,

make many cookie dough at once,

can i store them in the refrigerator,

then i don't need to make the dough everytime,

how long i can store it??

3. the cookies i baked, if i store them in a air-tight container,

how long i can store it??

do i need to put them in the refrigerator??

thanks

12/11/133:33 AM

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Julia M. UsherFounder and Host, Cookie Connection; Owner, Recipes for a Sweet Life

Hi, Polly, You've got lots of great questions here. I'll try to answer each one, but next time, please break them up into separate posts. It will be much easier for people to find this content later if it is labelled more specifically and more focused (in separate forum posts). Also, I moved this post to the forum called Cookie Conundrums, because all of your questions seem to relate to the baking/storage of cookies or how to handle modifications of cookie recipes.

First, a comment - it's going to be hard to scale up your business to be profitable if you can only bake 4 to 5 cookies at a time. Baking at such small scale generally generates more waste and has higher fixed prep/setup costs associated with it, as you've pointed out. If you find you have the demand, you'll probably need/want to look into alternate space pretty quickly. It's just not efficient to work at such small scale very long.

1. Just break the number of eggs that the recipe calls for, mix them up, weigh them, and pour off half of the weight (or however much is needed) into the recipe. The other half can be frozen or refrigerated for the next batch.

2. Yes, dough can be refrigerated for a few days, or frozen for a couple of months and still retain its freshness provided it is wrapped well. Different doughs have different holding properties but I store my rolled doughs up to 2 months in the freezer with no material changes.

3. I don't recommend storing baked or baked/iced cookies in the fridge. Sugar is hygroscopic (attracts moisture), so cookies will get soft in the fridge, and iced ones can bleed. Just store in an airtight container at room temp. Again, storing properties depend on the recipe, but I can keep cookies up to a week or more if properly contained without losing freshness or taking on the flavor of the container. That said, use containers only for cookies so they don't pick up other off-odors or flavors.

Best of luck.

12/11/1310:09 AM

PollyNibbler

thanks for helping me the move to right page, I'm still not too familiar to classify the topic..

we only sell cookies in part-time and on the online auction website, so we think the MOQ should be 10~15 pieces per order, we can make it on weekend we worry that if the MOQ too high, no-one will buy it storing dough or cookies can be a good idea for us, and it can less the waste.

cost estimate is quite difficult for me... i also need to calculate how many cookies i can make by using half ingredients..and i dont know how to calculate the wage...

hope i can success...

12/11/139:20 PM