- Ready-to-bake cookie dough is convenient, affordable, and tasty.
- We tried baking cookies from the six classic brands of cookie dough: Annie’s Homegrown, Sweet Loren’s, Great Value, Pillsbury, Soozie’s Doozies, and Nestle.
- Nestle was the clear winner, maintaining the perfect balance of golden brown on the outside and gooey on the inside.
There are few better things in life than a hot chocolate chip cookie, fresh out of the oven. Fortunately, some of the tastiest cookies come pre-packaged and ready to bake.
We tried cookies baked from six different brands of ready-to-bake dough.
For the sake of consistency, we tried them all in the standard chocolate chip variety, or chocolate chunk if chip version was not available.
Here's how they stacked up.
Annie’s Organic Chocolate Chunk cookies were high in calories, but packed with chocolate.
Annie's is a brand known for using organic ingredients, and that's exactly what they promised with this dough.
However, just because something is organic doesn't mean it's necessarily good for you, seeing as Annie's had the highest calorie count of any of the cookie dough with 140 calories per cookie.
It was also one of the more expensive doughs that gave you the least amount of cookies, coming in at $5 per package for only 12 cookies.
But if you love crunchy cookies you might love these.
It seemed like these cookies had the biggest chocolate chips out of all of the cookies we tried. They were also the crunchiest, so if you're looking for a soft, homemade cookie, this isn't it. But if you love a crispy cookie, these could be for you.
Sweet Loren’s Gluten Free Chocolate Chunk were soft, but not as flavorful as the other cookies.
They're soft and chewy, but these cookies had a bit of a grainy texture and were less flavorful than the other cookies we tried.
Like Annie's, Sweet Loren's contained enough dough for 12 cookies. At 120 calories per cookie, these cookies had higher calories than most other brands.
But if you have allergies or dietary restrictions these are a pretty great option.
Fortunately for those with dietary restrictions, these convenient cookies are gluten-free, dairy-free, and nut-free.
Walmart’s Great Value Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough was a great bargain, but the cookies were kind of tough to separate.
The least expensive of the doughs, Walmart's store brand stacked up pretty nicely against its name-brand competitors. There were 24 cookies to a pack, which is a great value.
But if you're looking for pretty cookies, you'll want to look elsewhere - the dough didn't break cleanly or easily, so the cookies come out in all different sizes.
The cookies were lower in calories than most other brands we tried.
When baked, the cookies were also a little bit smaller than other brands. Because of this, they had fewer calories: only 80 calories per cookie.
Overall, they were pretty tasty.
Pillsbury Chocolate Chip Cookies were packed with flavor.
There weren't a lot of chocolate chips in these cookies, but it was totally fine because that meant more dough. And Pillsbury's dough was really, really delicious.
These are an excellent choice especially if you prefer less chocolate chips and more dough.
They were not overly high in calories, either - two cookies come to 170 calories.
Pillsbury's cookies were soft and chewy.
After baking, the cookies came out of the oven soft and chewy, although they're more like a sugar cookie with chocolate chips than a chocolate chip cookie.
Soozie’s Doozies Gourmet Cookies lived up to their name.
Soozie's Doozies are packaged differently than the other cookies. Instead of a wrapper and cardboard tray, they come in a handy resealable bag.
They had bigger chocolate chips and better cookie flavor than some other brands we tried. Plus, they were pretty reasonable at only 100 calories per cookie.
These cookies had big chocolate chips.
In terms of flavor, Soozie's dough produced some of the tastiest cookies.
Plus, the resealable package is great if you only wanted to bake a few cookies at a time.
Nestle Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies were our favorite.
No wonder it's so popular. At just 80 calories per cookie, the Nestle Toll House dough tasted the best after baking.
Plus, the cookies maintained their chewiness, even a day after baking.
They may not have looked the prettiest, but they were the most delicious.
The final cookies had a great ratio of chocolate to dough. Plus, the dough was really easy to separate.
They may not have looked the prettiest, but they were the most delicious.
It's worth noting that these cookies were a bit smaller and less round than some other cookies since they retained part of their square dough shape even after baking.
But, after baking, these Nestle cookies were by far the best cookies of the bunch.
- Read more:
- Teens' favorite snacks are mostly chips and cookies, even though almost half of those surveyed say they prefer healthy snacks
- What cookies look like around the world
- You can build your own halloween gingerbread house that looks just like a haunted mansion
- We tested the cookie recipes on Nestle, Hershey's, and Ghirardelli chocolate chip packages, and Ghirardelli's was our favorite