With midterms fast approaching and the holiday season on the horizon, many students including myself will find themselves baking Christmas cookies with their family and friends. Whether they’re intended to leave out in Christmas Eve, or simply to enjoy with loved ones, these tips will have your cookies tasting, smelling, and looking delicious.

Firstly, and arguable most importantly, cool your cookies prior to placing them in the oven. Not only does cool cookie dough ensure a less flat, greasy cookie, it also helps retain the true flavor of the dough. Ideally, the cookies will chill in the fridge overnight, but I often find that a half hour is plenty to maintain the integrity of the cookie. In some cases, this step can be skipped altogether, but if your dough feels especially soft and warm, some time in the fridge will make sure that your cookies come out of the oven delicious and beautiful.

Secondly, I always recommend lining your baking sheet with a layer or two of parchment paper. This helps prevent the cookies from spreading too thin, and it promotes even browning of the cookies. While most of us typically just spray the baking sheet with cooking spray, this creates the greasy foundation that can often lead to thin, puddly cookies. Parchment paper conducts heat and ensures that the cookies cook evenly.

Thirdly, I find it helpful to decide when the cookies are done based on visual cues rather than cook time. While some ovens are regularly calibrated to be totally temperature accurate, many commercial use ovens are not properly adjusted, meaning that 350 degrees in your oven could actually be 325 or 375. Because of this temperature inaccuracy, it is often more accurate to gauge done-ness by color and texture. Cookies should still be quite soft, and the edges should be slightly darker than the top of the cookie. If the edge is significantly darker, remove the cookies from the oven regardless of cook time, because this likely means the bottom of the cookie has burned. Alternatively, buying an oven thermometer can help combat this issue, as it shows the actual temperature of your oven, meaning you are free to watch Netflix while your cookies bake rather than being forced to watch over them.

Lastly, cool ingredients like butter and eggs should ideally be brought to room temperature prior to putting together the dough. While this might sound counterintuitive considering tip #1, cold ingredients are much more difficult to combine and emulsify into a uniform batter. The first step of almost any cookie recipe is to cream butter and sugar, which is a step that is made all but impossible with cold butter. While the butter should still be cool to the touch and not melted, butter fresh out of the fridge is far too solid to fully incorporate with sugar. Allowing your ingredients to warm up to room temperature creates a more even dough, creating a more even cooking process.

Hopefully these tips are helpful to your cookie baking process, and happy holidays to all who are celebrating Christmas this year!