Making a batch of cookies is such a popular home-baking project, but there are plenty
of ways you can end up sabotaging your cookies. Here are the mistakes everyone makes when
baking cookies. Don't fall for them. Bake your cookies right and eat them, too.
At the beginning of nearly every cookie recipe, the first step is to cream the butter and
sugar together. This is also referred to as "creaming" and is an integral step in cookie
recipes. The first minute or so of creaming just brings the ingredients together, with
it resembling dense wet sand. After a few more minutes, you're likely to notice that
your buttercup yellow butter mixture is starting to lighten. The ingredients will begin to
expand, and the friction from beating will begin to cream the butter and sugar together.
According to Stella Parks, pastry chef and cookbook author at Serious Eats, five minutes
of creaming is about how long you should shoot for to achieve the perfect texture.
During the creaming process, what you're essentially doing is incorporating air into your cookies,
which translates to lighter and fluffier cookies. The aeration allows the cookies to expand
in the oven, giving the baking powder or soda you used a path to expand their gases.
When you're cooking dinner, you may be tempted to add a little bit of salt here, and some
extra butter there, letting your creativity flow with the progress of the meal. And for
many savory dishes, that's a perfectly acceptable way to cook, if not preferred. Baking, on
the other hand, is a science, and assuming the recipe you're using was written and tested
by an experienced baker, chances are you should follow it as closely as possible. Using the
right measuring tools and following the recipe exactly are the first steps to baking the
perfect cookies.
Is there really a difference between a half teaspoon and a whole teaspoon of baking soda?
There is, and it could make or break your chocolate chip cookies. Before getting started,
take a little time to learn how to properly scoop your flour, learn the different uses
for wet and dry measuring cups, and maybe even invest in a kitchen scale to make sure
you're measuring the exact amount of ingredients every time.
As you're reading the instructions for your cookies, you see a note saying you're supposed
to use room temperature butter—but your butter is still chilling in the fridge. What
is room temperature anyway?
According to pastry chef and cookbook author Claire Saffitz, room temperature is about
68-70 degrees fahrenheit. You'll notice your butter is in the sweet spot when you can spread
it easily or stick your finger into it without resistance. Room temperature butter is ideal
for creaming in a cookie recipe, because it's going to be easier to aerate, making for a
better-textured cookie overall. It's also going to be easier on your mixer, which will
have to do less work to break the butter down.
While you're pulling your butter out of the fridge, go ahead and pull the eggs out too.
Taking the chill off the eggs will help them aerate faster as well, and make them easier
to mix into the dough. If you've forgotten to pull your butter out early, consider cutting
your butter up into smaller pieces before measuring anything else out to warm up faster.
As far as we're concerned, there are two types of bakers in the world. Bakers who scrape
down the bowl, and bakers who don't.
"What? Like it's hard?"
Not scraping down the bowl puts you firmly in the amateur baker category, which is easily
remedied with a quick swish of a bowl scraper or rubber spatula, at a few key points during
the mixing process. Typically, you'll scrape the ingredients that have stuck to the sides
and bottom of the bowl after creaming, during and after adding eggs, and once or twice while
adding flour and additional liquid ingredients.
This simple step is worth it when every cookie comes out with impressive uniformity. The
masters at King Arthur Baking Company point out that even if the recipe doesn't explicitly
call for scraping the bowl down, it's best practice to do it anyway. If you don't, you
might have unevenly mixed dough, which can result in the last few cookies baking completely
different than the first cookies scooped from the batch.
Many baking recipes miss the one ingredient that can truly bring out all of the flavors
and sweetness together. It's not egg yolks, a specialty spice, or even more sugar. It's
salt. While a little sea salt on top of a chocolate chip cookie may not seem like an
amazing idea, it's actually the secret ingredient that will probably make it better than any
chocolate chip cookie you've had before. HuffPost explains that salt gives our bodies a boost
when it comes to processing the sweetness of sugar. A philosophical way to look at it
is this: you'll never fully appreciate the sweetness of your cookies until you add a
little salt to the mix.
"Sweet and salty."
You can achieve a nice salted cookie effect by using a little salted butter in the recipe,
upping the amount of salt, or sprinkling a little sea salt on top of the cookies before
baking.
If you've ever had cookies stick to a baking sheet, only to crumble when trying to scoop
them off, you probably already understand why parchment paper is a necessity when baking
cookies. But providing a non-stick surface for your cookies to bake on is really just
one of the benefits of using parchment paper. While aluminum foil guarantees that your cookies
won't stick to the tray, there's a chance that you'll still have to peel shards of foil
off the back of your cookies. Cookies are far less likely to stick to parchment paper—just
don't confuse it with wax paper, which is lightly coated with silicone.
Parchment paper also provides a thin layer of insulation to help evenly distribute heat
from the pan when baking, making for cookie bottoms that are nicely golden brown instead
of overcooked. For roll-out cookie dough, consider rolling the dough on lightly floured
parchment paper instead of the countertop.
You've probably noticed on the back of a brownie mix that it says to shorten your bake time
if using a dark pan. That's because dark pans absorb more heat and cook faster than lighter
pans. When using a dark nonstick baking sheet, you run the risk of burning your cookies by
overheating them or scorching the bottom of the cookie before the rest of the cookie has
had enough time to bake.
If all you've got is a dark nonstick cookie sheet, Taste of Home recommends baking your
cookies on a silicone baking mat to help insulate and distribute the heat. We don't recommend
turning your oven temperature down, because that will affect the overall rise of your
cookies. Instead, if your heating element is at the bottom of the oven, try putting
the cookies on a higher rack to promote more even cooking from both the top and bottom.
Even if you've done everything right during the cookie mixing process, there's still a
chance that the cookie dough all the way at the bottom of the bowl won't have the same
amount of mix-ins as the dough in the rest of the bowl. As the kitchen wizards at Cook's
Illustrated point out, it's a common conundrum to discover that the cookies scooped towards
the end are as full of mix-ins as those from the first batch. But if you follow this simple
step, you'll make those last few cookies just as amazing as the first few.
The secret? Keep a handful of mix-ins to the side, so when you get to the bottom of the
bowl, you can fortify the rest of the dough.
Everyone's got an opinion on what makes the perfect cookie. Some people can't resist crispy
cookies with a snap, while others insist that a gooey and chewy cookie is what a cookie
should be. Sometimes the recipe has a lot to do with the outcome of the cookies. For
many cookies, though, the bake time has a good deal to do with the final texture of
the cookie.
You'll notice that many recipes tend to have a specific baking temperature, and then a
range of time they should be baked in. Southern Living advises that in most cookie cases—chocolate
chip anyway—cookies are golden brown on the edges, yet still soft in the middle at
around the 10-minute mark. At this point, you can either take the cookies out and let
them finish cooking on the baking sheet, or leave them in the oven for a few more minutes.
All cookies are relatively soft right after baking, but once they're cooled you'll see
how crisp they managed to get in the oven. With that in mind, if your cookies come out
a little crunchier than you'd like, try baking them a couple of minutes less to achieve the
perfect texture.
You may be tempted to put as many balls of cookie dough on a baking sheet that you can,
in an effort to get as many fresh cookies on the table as quickly as possible. But leaving
room in-between your cookies has a few benefits. Most cookies spread to some degree while baking.
Leaving at least two inches of space between each cookie ensures that when the cookies
spread, they won't run into each other. Of course, cookies that smash into each other
while baking still taste pretty great, but they're not that attractive to look at.
"Well, that sucks."
Additionally, leaving room between the cookies will allow heat to evenly distribute around
each of the cookies for an even bake.
It might seem like an innocuous baking mistake to make, but baking at a lower temperature
than the recipe calls for may lead to some issues. Most cookies are leavened with baking
powder or baking soda, which is activated when it heats up. The faster the leavener
heats up, the better rise your cookies will have. At a lower temperature, your cookies
may not rise appropriately or may rise and then fall after baking.
Most people don't intentionally set their ovens too low. The best way to judge the temperature
is to put a reliable oven thermometer inside the oven so you can easily read it.
If you do a lot of baking, you have probably noticed which sides or corners of your oven
are hotter than others. It's most apparent when baking a sheet cake and one side of the
tray gets darker before the other side. There's also a vertical heat difference between the
bottom and top racks depending on where the heat source is in the oven.
The best way to thwart uneven heating is to rotate your sheet tray while baking. About
halfway through baking, rotate the sheet tray 180 degrees. If you're only baking one sheet,
place the tray on the center rack of the oven. If you're baking several sheets, you'll get
the most ideal heat dispersion by moving the bottom tray to the top rack and the top tray
to the bottom rack.
We know how difficult it is to let cookies cool when they've just come out of the oven.
But we'd suggest letting the cookies cool for five to 10 minutes before digging in.
A cooling rack is ideal here for a very important reason. Cooling cookies on a rack allows for
more airflow around the cookies and cools them off more quickly. Cookies left on a hot
cookie sheet will continue to cook for several minutes even after coming out of the oven.
If you've baked your cookies on a piece of parchment paper, it's easy to pick up the
paper from a short side of the tray and slide the whole sheet onto your cooling rack. If
you don't have a cooling rack, consider taking your cookies out of the oven a minute or so
earlier to finish cooking on the hot sheet tray.
During the holidays, many people find themselves churning out cookies for gift boxes, work
parties, and family gatherings. Times like these may leave you with more cookie dough
than cookie sheets, constantly rotating sheets in and out of the oven in batches. Even though
you've got a lot of baking to do, you should think twice before plopping fresh dough onto
a hot sheet.
When immediately reusing a hot sheet tray, cookies begin to melt before they have a chance
to rise. This makes for cookies that bake flatter and spread further than the same cookies
baked on a cool cookie sheet. If you're short on cookie trays and time, at least let your
trays cool for five minutes before popping them back in the oven with more cookies.
Not all cookie doughs are created equal. While some cookie dough is meant to be scooped out
of the bowl directly onto a baking tray and sent straight to the oven, others need time
to chill out before baking. According to Martha Stewart, rolled and cut-out cookies should
absolutely be chilled before baking. When chilling these types of cookie doughs, you
should refrigerate them for at least 30 minutes and up to 24 hours before baking.
Of course, not all cookie doughs should be chilled. Thin, crispy tuile cookies are meant
to spread while baking, and dense cookies won't benefit from absorbing more moisture
in the refrigerator.
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