How to Bake a Hundred Cookies for a Crowd

Joanne Adirim

Founder & Executive Pastry Chef

February 20, 2022

Joanne has been baking professionally for 25 years. A talented recipe and product developer, she has crafted desserts for hotels, restaurants, and gourmet grocers across the world. Joanne developed Cookie Chips® Baking Mixes for bakers who wants professional results at home using the same high-quality ingredients she uses in her professional kitchen.

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A Chef's Easy Large Batch Cookie Recipe.

So you've just agreed to supply a valentine's gift exchange, friend's party, kids' bake sale, or just looking for fun things to bake with loads of the best chocolate chip cookies. Now what? No need to stress, you can do this. Seriously. It’s a lot easier than you realize. You'll only need two to three sheet pans, a box of parchment paper and one oven on bake day. That’s it. Now let's see how the magic happens.

The secret is in our bakery quality chocolate chip cookies. It’s that simple. Our cookie mix naturally lends itself to creating loads of cookies from one bag of mix. For a special event, you may want to make your crunchy chocolate chip cookies larger than our typical pop in your mouth potato chip size Cookie Chips®. To do this you need a bit of planning and probably 2-3 bags of cookie mix. We also recommend dressing up your cookies with extra chocolate on top.

Pipe your dough and set aside for the next pan. If you're freezing the dough, now is the time to rotate it to the freezer.

The first step (when baking anything) is to organize your workspace. In the French culinary world, we call it mise en place. Be sure to review our easy cookie recipe and have all the ingredients and equipment that you’ll need on hand. You can definitely mix the dough by hand, but if you have a mixer you should pull it out with the paddle attachment.

Pro Tip: Bulk Baking a Large Batch of Cookies.

The key to making your job super easy is to make the chocolate chip cookie dough a few days in advance. Pre portion the dough and store it all in the freezer.

With your ingredients, make sure you’ve softened your butter and brought your eggs to room temperature. To quickly bring your eggs to room temperature, fill a large bowl with warm to hot water (not too hot) and gently place your eggs in. Let them sit for about 10 minutes and they will be ready to go. Take your butter out of the packaging and cut it up into smaller pieces. Let it stand for about 30 minutes at cool room temperature. Now let's get baking.

crunchy cookies and cold brew for breakfast

I put out my delicious chocolate chip cookies for a breakfast get-together and paired them with Califa Farms cold brew coffee.

A Pastry Chef's Large Batch Cookie Recipe

To Make

Remember your mise en place for both equipment and ingredients. Make sure you are ready to go with everything.
Measure out all your ingredients and set up your mixer with a paddle attachment. You can make two bags of cookie dough in a standard size mixing bowl. This is a real time saver. Batch your recipe so that you are only adding 2x the amount for each ingredient. For example, the recipe calls for 4 oz or 1 stick butter and 1 large egg. For two bags, you will need to add in 8 oz or 2 sticks butter and 2 eggs. If you are making more than two bags, after you finish making the dough, scrape the bowl and paddle really well and then use it again. No need to wash it. This will help move the process quickly.

Why are we only batching the ingredients by 2x?

Batching 2x helps you maximize each ingredient you have on hand, while still fitting your mixer bowl. If you have an extra large mixer bowl, you can try to batch by 3x.

Pipe, place or scoop. If you decide to scoop the dough, there are mini ice cream scoops you can use to make these. You can also use a disposable piping bag. The slowest method, but definitely doable, is to use our place method described on the back of the bag. Set up two sheet pans with parchment paper. Portion the dough onto a sheet pan, placing each dough ball directly next to each other. Once you have filled up the first sheet pan, place this into the freezer and start with the 2nd pan. When the 2nd pan is complete, remove the first sheet pan and slide the fresh cookies from the 2nd pan directly onto the top of the frozen dough. Place this stacked pan back into the freezer. Continue portioning the dough on the empty sheet pan following the same method described above and stacking the sheets on top of each other. You can keep the dough frozen until you are ready to bake.
Now that you are ready to bake, preheat your oven per the bag instructions. Prepare 2-3 sheet pans with parchment paper. Take the cookies from the freezer and place the dough balls onto the baking pan, spacing about 2” apart. If you are adding chocolate chunks or a Valrhona chocolate feve to the top of the cookies, place it on top now. In the oven, you can try to bake two sheet pans on two racks in your oven. If you get a good bake, keep this strategy. If only one rack gives you a good bake, that’s okay too.

When the cookies come hot out of the oven, set them aside to cool and rotate the next pan in. Get them ready for packaging.

When the pan is done baking, let it cool for 1 minute. Then, gently slide the parchment paper with the cookies onto the counter or a table. You can reuse your parchment paper after you remove the cooled cookies. Keep baking sheet pans of cookies using this strategy.

Where do I put my cookies after they cool?

A cookie box is the solution for you. This is a part of your mise en place. You need to have these on hand and assembled on cookie bake day. Once your cookies are cool, place them in the box. You can stack the cookies by placing a sheet of parchment paper between the layers.

There you go! It was a lot of work, but you've just baked over 100 crispy-crunchy cookies. You did it professionally, organizing your workspace using the principle of mise en place, and with pastry chef crafted cookie mix. Give yourself a pat on the back, you seriously earned it!