Birthday and Mother's Day 2025 Cookie Baking Gifts

This is turning out to be a show-and-tell week. 

I made this batch of chocolate chip
cake-style cookies using the small scoop

I've been wanting to show you the cookie baking gifts my daughters gave me this year for my birthday and for Mother's Day. They know I like to bake cookies and found gifts I would really appreciate receiving.

For my birthday they gave me this set of three cookie scoops. I've never had cookie scoops, instead I've always used a couple of teaspoons to scoop drop cookie dough. It's time consuming to use a pair of spoons while trying to make every cookie look neat and the whole batch look uniform.

My favorite scoop is the smallest one. I've baked a couple of batches of chocolate chip cookies and oatmeal cookies with this small one. I like the smaller-sized cookie you get with the smallest scoop. My daughters borrowed the scoops last weekend to bake cookies for an event at church. They made both snickerdoodles and gingersnaps using the medium-sized scoop. My guess is they would love if I made some chocolate chip or M & M cookies with the largest scoop. I'll keep that in mind when I want to do something special for them.

what I like about these cookie scoops:

• The cookies are uniform in size and shape, making them visually appealing when sharing with others.
• I don't just like the look of uniformity in size and shape, but the cookies bake evenly as they're all the same size and have the same mounding.
• It's fast and easy to scoop and drop the dough onto the baking sheet. I can't believe how fast it is to get the cookie dough onto the baking sheet with a scoop.
• My fingers stay clean in the process of dropping the dough.

The other gift was for Mother's Day. Again my daughters know that not only do I like to bake cookies, but I like the finished result to look attractive. (Maybe you remember a couple of Christmases ago they gave me a shortbread mold.)

This gift is an embossed rolling pin for imprinting a pattern on rolled out cookie dough before baking. The types of cookies that I will think I will use this for are speculoos, springerle, and gingerbread. If you've ever had Biscoff, that's a speculoos cookie. Springerle, the German anise flavored cookie, is traditionally made with a mold. However, I found recipes online to make a dough that will work with an embossed rolling pin. I'm looking forward to making those. And of course, gingerbread cookies, the thin kind, are a favorite of mine.

what I like about the embossed rolling pin:

• I can make really attractive cookies for gifting and sharing at the holidays, and to please me.
• It will save time and money in "decorating" the cookie by embossing the dough instead of using icing and sprinkles.

These gifts are special in a couple of ways. One, my daughters took the time to think of what I'd like. Two, these are money and time-saving gifts. I can use them to share or gift cookies that look almost professional with just a little effort. The cookie baking gifts are just the sort of thing I would want to buy for myself, but would talk myself out of because of cost. 

Do you use cookie scoops? What do you think of them? Have you tried an embossed rolling pin?