As we roll into the cooler and darker days of Autumn, cookie baking season starts anew. Growing up my mother would spend part of her weekend baking a variety of cookies and one of the most common ones was sugar cookies. They bring back such fond memories… Trader Joe’s is being extra helpful in selling us this ready to bake cookie dough. Let me walk you through how to use this product. Update: I am getting a lot of negative remarks about these cookies. I am wondering if there is batch difference. I will pick up another tube and re-test this week.
Trader Joe’s always seems to have a large variety of cookies. Either in the bakery section or in the snack section, there is something for everyone. But for fresh baked cookies, you have to look in the egg section where they keep a small variety of ready to bake cookies. My discontinued favorite was the double chocolate chunk cookies (replaced by a gluten free option that frankly is not nearly as good).
Trader Joe’s is copycatting another product that is quite popular, the Pillsbury Sugar Cookie dough. It comes in the same plastic tube and you basically warm up the oven, slice some dough off the roll lay it out on a baking sheet, and bake. It couldn’t be simpler.
We love to make sugar cookies around here and decorate them. We love using all kinds of nice cookie cutters that we’ve gotten as hand-me-downs from parents and even though our kids are in their late teens now, they still love to make and eat cookies at the holidays.
If you look at the ingredients section at the bottom of this review, you’ll see that it’s a pretty short list. It’s basically flour, sugar, butter, water, egg, vanilla, salt and leavening. That is what I put in my cookie dough.
Baking Instructions
So, just turn on your oven to 350f. Get out a baking sheet and some parchment paper and take the tube of dough out of the fridge.
You have a choice to make at this point. You can just make regular round cookies or you can make some fancy shapes with your own cookie cutter. (Also if you want to frost them, get that stuff ready too but I didn’t in this review)
I opted for the easiest method since I just wanted to review them for taste, but if you want to make cut out shape, you’ll need to leave the dough on the counter for about 15 minutes until it softens up a bit so you can roll it out and punch out your shapes. I just cut slices off the roll and put them on the baking sheet a couple of inches apart.
Then I baked them for 10 minutes and pulled them out when the edges were starting to turn brown.
I moved them to a cooling rack with a spatula and let the baking sheet cool off and started the second batch. I got about 12 cookies out of the roll of dough.
This was super simple and highly satisfying.
How did the Trader Joe’s Sugar Cookies Taste?
As for the sugar cookies, I couldn’t really tell the difference between these and homemade to be honest. If you look at the ingredient list, it isn’t any different than homemade. What Trader Joe’s is doing is buying you a lot of time and saving you the mess. At $3.99 for 1 lb of cookie dough, I would say this is a great deal. I am not sure we are going to break out the mixer and get everything all covered in dough to make a couple of batches of cookies anymore.
I am going to give these a high rating because they are just as good as homemade but so much easier. I am going to rate them 9 Bells!
Ingredients
- WHEAT FLOUR
- SUGAR
- BUTTER (CREAM [MILK], NATURAL FLAVORS)
- WATER
- EGGS
- VANILLA EXTRACT (WATER, ETHYL ALCOHOL, VANILLA BEAN EXTRACTIVES)
- LEAVENING (MONOCALCIUM PHOSPHATE, SODIUM BICARBONATE, CORNSTARCH)
- SEA SALT
- CONTAINS MILK, EGG, WHEAT.
For some reason I think these cookies taste off. They have an overly buttery flavor, which does not taste homemade, unfortunately, since the other ingredients are great. But I re- read the ingredient list and the “natural flavors” which is akin to artificial flavors, only derived from natural ingredients, is the likely culprit. I bought two of these, and threw the second one out because of this fake butter flavor! 🙁 I love cookies and I really love butter and was really excited for these but sad to say– hard pass.
I didn’t get that flavor, but I think what you are talking about is diaceytl which is the buttered popcorn flavor which is naturally derived but can overwhelm like fake truffle flavors. Some people are more sensitive to it than others.
Honestly I just made a massive batch of cookies as a holiday tradition and these might be the worst sugar cookies I’ve ever had. There’s a pervasive smell of pizza dough or mac n cheese in the house and the cookies taste like they’re more savoury than sweet. Almost like someone put the wrong ingredients in the whole batch or something. Apparently a lot of other people on other forums are having the same problem. They definitely don’t taste homemade and I am massively disappointed and I have to light candles to get rid of this smell now. Would’ve been so much easier to make them from scratch.
Maybe a different batch? I gave some to my family and everyone thought they were pretty good.
I’ve got to disagree with you, these cookies were absolutely disgusting. They were by far the worst cookies that I have ever tasted. I thought it was just me at first, but aside from you everyone that I’ve seen review these say they taste off as well.
Crazy! Bad batch? Mine were perfectly fine. I think I will pick up another tube and see if something changed
My family and I tried them. They were horrible. Maybe they did a recipe change. 🤷♀️
Absolutely gross!! Tasted like flour. I did however notice on the package it tells you to use frosting on the cookies and also use sprinkles. We are in the thought that these are for holiday decorating. Maybe trader Joe’s is thinking since your gonna sweeten them up with all kinds of frosting and goodness on top they won’t go overboard by having a sweet cookie too!
When I was baking them, my son came in the kitchen and ask if I’m making mac & cheese or something cheesy. They did not taste good at all. It was my first time buying it, and it will be my last time.
I swear I will review these again. This makes no sense. Mine were good.
Nope! Everyone nailed it….these cookies are horrid! They don’t even taste like sugar cookies. The cheese and pizza dough comments bring it home. Lol. We’ve never kept cookies in our house this long….probably just end up throwing them away. Never again!