How Alex Guarnaschelli Dresses Up Store-Bought Cookie Dough

When it comes to buying pre-made dough to quickly bake cookies, you have plenty of quality options, insists PureWow. From traditional chocolate chip to sea-salted caramel, your favorite cookie flavors can be ready in 15 minutes. After all, culinary shortcuts shouldn't be shunned, especially when they can help you be on your way to snacking on gooey, chocolatey cookies from the comfort of your own home.

With the right culinary touch, celebrity chef Alex Guarnaschelli insists that the warm cookies you take out of the oven can be made in such a way that no one will know the dough was purchased from a store. When it comes to providing expert culinary tips to aspiring chefs, the "Chopped" judge is known to be a helpful, experienced source. From the right way to mix flour into dough to create the perfect cookie texture to adjusting oven temperatures and cooking times to yield crunchy cookie edges, Guarnaschelli's tips have yet to fail us.

If you're making cookies for yourself, you probably don't think twice about throwing pre-made dough in the oven, but if you're trying to impress a crowd, the celebrity chef has a tip for adding a homemade touch to the store-bought dough.

From adding extra spices to drizzling white chocolate on top of each cookie, ways to upgrade batches of store-bought cookie dough are limited only by culinary creativity. For an easy baking tip, Guarnaschelli explained to People that raw logs of cookie dough can be rolled directly into your choice of toppings before they are sliced and baked. Sweet and crunchy additions like chopped nuts, crushed candy, and coarse sugar granules are a great way to add texture, color, and flavor to pre-made cookie dough.

To pack the inside of the cookies with even more flavor, Guarnaschelli recommends mixing additional chocolate chips or candy directly into the dough. When you roll the dough to bake, you can decide how big you would like each cookie to be and customize flavors according to your taste preferences. If half of your crowd prefers Reese's Pieces and the other prefers M&M's, for example, their wish is your command. Pre-made cookie dough doesn't need to be boring, unless you want it to be.