Before You Bake Anything
Tools worth owning and tools you don't need
I get asked about equipment more than almost anything else. People assume there's a list somewhere of the "right" cookie tools, and if they just buy that list, the cookies will be good. There isn't a list. But there are a few things I'd tell you to actually spend money on, and a lot of stuff you can skip.
Let's start with the scale, because I've already made my case for it in the first lesson. If you don't have one yet, go get one before you get anything else on this list. Fifteen dollars, done. Everything below matters less than that.
The short list of things I'd actually buy
A light-colored metal baking sheet. Not the dark nonstick kind. Dark pans absorb more heat and brown the bottoms of your cookies faster than the tops, and you end up pulling cookies that look pale on top and are almost burnt underneath. A plain aluminum sheet, the kind that looks a little cheap, bakes more evenly. I have four of them and they're not fancy.
Parchment paper, not a silicone mat. I know the reusable mats feel more responsible. But parchment gives you a cleaner release and I feel like cookies spread slightly less on it than on silicone, which matters if you're already fighting spread from a warm kitchen. Buy the roll, not the pre-cut sheets. Cheaper per square foot and you cut what you need.
An offset spatula, the small metal kind. Not for frosting, for lifting cookies off the pan without folding them in half. A regular spatula is too stiff and too big. This one's maybe six dollars and it's the tool I miss most when I'm baking at someone else's house.
A cookie scoop, and get the size that matches your recipe. Most of mine call for a tablespoon-ish scoop. If your scoop is bigger or smaller than what the recipe was written for, your bake times will be off even if everything else is right. This is a small thing that trips people up constantly.
Two sheet pans minimum, ideally three. You want one in the oven, one cooling, one loading. If you've only got one pan you end up rushing the cooling step, putting warm dough on a hot pan, and wondering why that batch spread more than the last one.
A bench scraper. Cheap, flat, rectangular. Good for portioning dough, scraping your counter clean, and cutting bar cookies into even squares instead of the sad, squished rectangles you get with a knife.
What you don't need
You do not need a stand mixer to make good cookies. A hand mixer does the same job for almost everything in this course. I have a stand mixer and I like it, mostly because my wrists are older than they used to be, but I made cookies for years with a hand mixer and nobody at the exchange table could tell the difference.
You don't need a cookie press unless you specifically want spritz cookies, and even then, most people use it twice a year and it lives in a drawer the rest of the time.
You don't need decorating tools. Piping bags, tip sets, the little turntables for icing, all of that. I'm not a decorator myself and I don't teach that side of things. If you love it, great, go find a class for it. But for what we're doing here, a butter knife and the back of a spoon will get frosting on a cookie just fine.
And you don't need a fancy cooling rack setup. Any wire rack works. The only thing that matters is that air can move under the cookie, so it's not steaming itself soft on a plate.
A word on almond frosting, because someone always asks
Every year at least one person wants the thick almond frosting, the kind that sets up firm but doesn't go crunchy. I made a version of that frosting for Ruby's birthday one year, at her specific request, and it took me four batches to get right. The first three either stayed too soft to stack the cookies or set up like candy shell and cracked when you bit into it. The fourth one worked, and I wrote the ratio down on an index card, which then disappeared somewhere in this house, the way my notes always do.
I bring this up because I want to be straight with you: I don't have a reliable version of that frosting to hand you. I've gotten it right once by trial and error, and I haven't fully nailed down why it worked that time and not the others. If someone in class wants to chase that particular frosting with me this season, I'm happy to experiment together, but I'm not going to pretend I've got the formula solved. Some things stay unsolved and you just keep trying.
My honest opinion on frosted, decorated sugar cookies for a cookie exchange, tool question aside: I don't usually bring them. They're pretty, they photograph well, and they're a lot of standing-around work for a cookie that mostly gets admired instead of eaten. I'd rather bring something with real flavor that people actually finish. Buy the tools if the decorating itself is fun for you. If it's not, skip it and put your time into a dough you'll actually repeat.
Before next time: take stock of what you've already got in your kitchen against this list, and if you're missing a light-colored sheet pan or a second one, that's worth picking up before we start baking in class. No need to buy anything fancy.