You should be able to microwave cookie dough. With that said, the only reason you’d ever microwave cookie dough is for the sake of baking that dough into actual crunchy or at least chewy cookies. It’s easier to make brownies on a microwave though.
Many modern microwaves of the 21st Century offer presets and baking options similar to their conventional oven counterpart, except you won’t have to deal with preheating. A “real” non-microwave oven is still ideal for baking though.
Regardless, can you microwave cookie dough in order to make or bake cookies? Keep on reading to find out.
Can You Microwave Cookie Dough Though?
Sure, but it’s best made with a convection or grill microwave oven with a high-enough wattage instead of a simpler mini microwave oven designed more for simple cooking and defrosting. Simply heating up cookie dough when you’re supposed to bake it will lead to disastrous results.
A “real” or conventional oven (that’s either gas-powered or electric-powered) is still the best when it comes to baking cookies simply because it uses heat conduction and gradual heating, which allows you more control and flexibility so that you don’t overbake or overheat them.
Long story short, you can microwave cookie dough in order to achieve the same results as baking them on a conventional oven, but do so with the caveat that microwaves, in general, are more limited and you should use convection microwave ovens for baking.
How to Make Cookies Using the Microwave
In order to make cookies using the microwave, get full-sized convection or grill microwave with grill attachment in order to do baking with microwave-like convenience. This microwave type allows you to cook, grill, barbecue, or bake instead of just heat, reheat, or defrost.
Basically, when you make a frozen cookie dough ball and place it in the microwave for half a minute, the microwave tends to micro-bake the cookie to something gooey and soft with crisp hardness around the edges.
That’s the caveat when microwave-baking a cookie. The resulting cookie tends to end up brownie-like rather than a hard-to-the-teeth cookie. A microwave has limits with its baking function even if it’s a convection microwave oven.
Obviously, you should shape it into a cookie first before baking. You should also set it on the baking setting too.
Freeze the Cookie Dough Then Microwave It to Cookie Perfection
A microwave can turn the cookie dough into a real cookie in just half a minute. It doesn’t matter what type of cookie dough you use. Any type of dough will do, particularly of the frozen variety that’s ready for baking.
Just pop it into the convection microwave with a baking set to make a real cookie. The dough can be for chocolate chip cookies or peanut butter oatmeal cookies. They can even be for buttermilk cookies found in those tin cans that double as needle and thread containers when recycled.
You cannot bake your entire batch of homemade cookies at once—especially when it comes to microwaving them. Store the dough in the fridge. Scoop up 6 cookies’ worth of dough to bake right away then scoop the rest into a separate cookie sheet.
You’ll get mostly chewy or brownie-like cookies with microwaves, with the thinnest, sharpest edges hardening to classic cookie texture and crispness.
Further reading: The 10 Best Microwave Rice Cooker
How Long to Microwave the Cookie Dough
The quick version of cooking cookie dough involves either a quick half-minute session or fiddling with the microwave controls to get something harder and more brittle than a chewy brownie cookie texture. We came up with 30 seconds because the 2-minute batch of cookies was a bust.
To be more specific, our attempt at chocolate chip cookies emerged more carbonny or charcoal-like than we intended. Like Santa’s coal in our stockings instead of the cookies you give him along with milk every Christmas.
Two minutes burn the dough. We went 30 seconds instead of a full minute to get a perfectly cooked cookie if a bit gooey. The dough is warmed up, the results are edible, and chewy cookies are a thing. You can fiddle with the time a bit, but 30 seconds seems to be as good as it gets.
The edges and bottom have a little crispness to them. Besides this, the results are chewy-delicious when push comes to shove.
Freezing and Storing the Microwaveable Cookie Dough Balls
Cram as many cookie balls onto the cookie sheet. From there, put the balls into a Ziploc bag into the freezer. This way, you can enjoy hot, homemade cookies you can easily prepare by popping them inside the microwave every time.
The storage part allows you to make cookies without making new dough every day. It’s the perfect system for those who want instant cookies. Otherwise, just do your standard oven baking with an oven that requires preheating.
The frozen cookie dough works well with either a microwave oven at 30 seconds or upwards to an hour with the standard or conventional oven (not including the 12 minutes required for preheating at the correct temperature).
Add Ice Cream for a Perfect Treat!
30 seconds of microwaving is the typical starting line for heating anything with a microwave. You can add about 10 or 20 seconds more (40 to 50 seconds) in order to bake extra-large scoops of cookie dough. 30 seconds is a good default or rule of thumb for your typical cookie size.
Cookie balls flattened to about the size of a Chips Ahoy, Pepperidge Farms, or Newtons cookie require about 30 seconds of microwaving. Once you cross the 1-minute mark, it becomes dicey whether or not you’ll end up with something edible.
Don’t extend the 30-60 second limit with delusions of grandeur, thinking you can Easy-Bake-Oven your way to making a Chips Ahoy piece of cookie from your homemade cookie dough. The nice-and-quick baking method results in a brownie-like chewy cookie.
If you want the Chips Ahoy type of cookies, you’d get closer to its hardness and crispness by baking the baked goods on an honest-to-goodness conventional electric/gas oven.
You may also like: Edible Cookie Dough {3 Delicious Flavors}
In Summary
Although the best things in life are free, buying yourself a convection microwave allows you to conveniently get your food faster compared to a conventional oven that requires preheating in order to work.
Yes, it’s possible to cook (or rather, bake) your own cookies with the assistance of a convection microwave oven that doesn’t only have simple heating capabilities and has a wattage of about 700 watts or higher. However, baking on a conventional oven remains your best bet.
