Take Your Cookie Cake To The Next Level With This Pie Crust Tip

Though it's served and shaped exactly like a cake, that's where the similarities between a cookie cake and your typical special-occasion dessert cake end. Otherwise, it's pretty much just an extra large cookie. To make it, you simply take any cookie recipe, flatten the dough into a pan, and throw it into the oven for a few minutes. The result? A single giant cookie that can be decorated and sliced like a cake.

According to Design, Eat, Repeat, the key to achieving the perfect cookie cake has a lot to do with the baking pan. Using a baking pan that's too big can cause you to spread the dough too thin, resulting in a crunchy, difficult-to-slice cookie cake. Using one that's too small, on the other hand, means the dough will be much thicker and could easily be left raw in the middle. 

Removing the cookie cake from the pan itself also presents a problem. If you don't let it cool all the way, some pieces may stick to the bottom. Luckily there's an easy way to circumvent all of these issues while also improving the quality of the dessert. As influencer Jocelyn Delk Adams shared in an Instagram post, it helps to treat it more like a pie than a cake.

Instead of worrying about the size of the pan, the thickness of the dough, or whether or not it'll fall apart when you try to remove it, Jocelyn Delk Adams (who goes by @grandbabycakes on Instagram) recommends using a prepared pie crust instead. In her post, she demonstrates how she uses store-bought graham cracker crust in place of a regular cake pan, which she then fills to the brim with cookie dough. Because it's baked like a pie, it can then be served straight from the dish.

Chocolate chip cookie brand Nestle Toll House also swears by this method, sharing that it even works with frozen pie crust. Per Nestle Toll House's instructions, you'll need to bake it for 55 to 60 minutes at 325 F degrees in an oven or until a knife comes out clean when inserted. Once cooled, the cookie dessert can then be decorated with whipped cream as Nestle Toll House suggests, or with frosting, chocolate sauce, caramel sauce, and nuts, like Adams shared on Instagram.