The Ultimate Guide to Edible Cookie Dough

How to make the best edible cookie dough plus five delicious variations including chocolate chip cookie dough, double chocolate chip, peanut butter, oatmeal cookie, and snickerdoodle (cinnamon sugar cookie dough). Jump to the Edible Cookie Dough Recipe or read on to see all of our tips.

This ultimate guide will help you make the most delicious edible (and safe) cookie dough. All five flavors store well in the refrigerator and can be frozen. You can also bake them! See all our tips below.

How to Make the Best Edible Cookie Dough

Edible cookie dough is simple to make. It’s very similar to baked cookies. Start by beating butter and sugar together until fluffy, light, and creamy. Then add in dry ingredients like flour and mix until a dough forms. You can use a hand mixer or stand mixer. If you don’t have a mixer, you can make the dough by hand. The texture won’t be as fluffy, but it will still taste great.

Our cookie dough is eggless. For the basic recipe, you will need the following ingredients:

• Flour — We use all-purpose flour, but a gluten-free blend should also work. For safety reasons, use heat-treated flour in the recipe. Heat treating flour is easy to do, we’ve shared how below.
• Unsalted Butter — The butter adds flavor and moisture to the cookie dough. You can use salted butter and leave out the salt added later on in the recipe. For vegan cookie dough, use non-dairy butter or try coconut oil.
• Baking soda — Even though this cookie dough can be enjoyed raw (unbaked), by adding baking soda, it makes sure that you can bake the dough. It also adds flavor and makes it taste more like regular cookie dough. If you don’t have it on hand, you can leave baking soda out.
• Sugar — We love the combination of granulated (white) and brown sugar. You can use one or the other. Keep in mind, though, that brown sugar will add the most flavor.
• Milk, cream or half-and-half — Since we leave eggs out of the recipe, the dough needs a bit of extra liquid to achieve the best texture. We typically add a tablespoon or two to the dough. For a vegan version, you can use non-dairy milk.
• Vanilla Extract — We use pure vanilla extract in our recipe, which does have alcohol content. If you are concerned about this, you can buy alcohol-free vanilla.

Secret Ingredient: The basic ingredient list above makes a delicious edible dough, but we love adding one more ingredient for flavor. A tiny bit of molasses makes the dough extra tasty and rich. We only use half a teaspoon. It’s a small amount, but wow does it make the cookie dough delicious. Since it’s such a small amount, we made it optional. (We realize not everyone wants to buy a whole jar of molasses for 1/2 teaspoon!) That said, we use molasses a lot on Inspired Taste so if you plan to stick around and make a few of our other recipes like our Guilt-Free Healthy Banana Bread, these Ginger Cookies, and our Barbecue Sauce.

Once you have the basic recipe down, you can play around to make different variations. Here are five delicious edible cookie dough flavors. They all use the basic recipe as a base:

1. Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough — This takes the basic dough from above and adds chocolate chips.
2. Double Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough — Add unsweetened cocoa powder and chocolate chips to the basic recipe.
3. Peanut Butter Cookie Dough — Swap a bit of the butter called for in the basic recipe with peanut butter and add crushed peanuts.
4. Oatmeal Cookie Dough — Swap a bit of the flour called for in the basic recipe with old-fashioned rolled oats and add ground cinnamon. For oatmeal raisin cookie dough, mix in raisins.
5. Snickerdoodle Cookie Dough — Add a bit of cream of tartar and ground cinnamon to the basic dough. Then sprinkle cinnamon sugar over the top when serving. Cream of tartar tastes sour and is a common ingredient in snickerdoodle cookies. If you do not have it on hand, you can leave it out for more of a cinnamon sugar cookie dough.

Is Cookie Dough Safe to Eat?

Normally, the answer to this is no due to a small chance of contaminated flour and/or eggs, but thanks to our smart edible cookie dough recipe you can enjoy it without safety issues.

Based on our research, here’s what we have learned: There are two culprits that make regular raw cookie dough unsafe to eat: unpasteurized eggs and raw flour. In this recipe, we remove the eggs completely and heat treat the flour so that it is safer.

Research is still being done surrounding the safety of raw flour. There was a recall of flour in 2016. Since we are not flour safety experts, here’s what the US Department of Health and Human Services has to say about it. (No matter what recipe you follow, it’s always a good idea to check flour recalls.)

To be safe, in this recipe, we treat the flour so that it reaches a minimum of 165 degrees Fahrenheit. You might also find heat treated flour for sale online. We’re hoping more flour brands do this in the future, but for now, we did see that Page House sells heat-treated all-purpose wheat flour (search for it online).

The good news is that heat treating flour at home is easy! You can do this two ways:

1. Microwave it for a couple of minutes in a microwave-safe dish. Stir at least once during cooking. When it reaches 165 degrees Fahrenheit throughout, use it in the edible cookie dough recipe.
2. Spread flour onto a baking sheet and bake in a 350-degree Fahrenheit oven for 10 minutes.

Can You Bake Edible Cookie Dough?

Here’s my favorite part of the recipe, you can bake this eggless and edible cookie dough and make excellent cookies! All of the variations we shared above bake nicely. They spread a little more than usual, but to be honest, that’s not a bad thing.

The oatmeal cookie is my favorite when it’s baked. It spreads into a thin cookie that is delicious, chewy, and a little crisp.

Bake the cookie dough in a 350-degree Fahrenheit oven until the bottoms and edges are light brown, about 10 minutes.

How to Store Cookie Dough

I noticed online that a lot of people were asking how to make cookie dough for just one or two people. Our recipe makes about a cup of dough, which is close to sixteen tablespoonfuls worth.

That’s too much for one person, but here’s another great thing about this recipe: you can store it in the refrigerator for up to five days and in the freezer for a month, probably more. If you freeze it, scoop the dough into balls then freeze individually. This way, you can remove them as you need them (just thaw in the refrigerator). Hooray for cookie dough for one, two or more when you need it!

We love baking cookies, too! Here are some of our most popular baked cookie recipes:

• How to make the best homemade chocolate chip cookies. This easy recipe makes cookies with crisp edges and chewy middles.
• We love these easy double chocolate cookies with butter, cocoa powder, and extra chocolate chunks.
• How to make oatmeal raisin cookies that are soft in the middle, a little chewy on the outside, and full of warm flavors like cinnamon and vanilla.
• Easy snickerdoodles recipe with crispy edges and soft and chewy centers.
• Take a look at our homemade peanut butter cookies. They are delicious and naturally flour, butter, and dairy free!