Timely tips for better cookies
Ingredient temps, mixing, and more
We’ve baked a lot of cookies (thousands?) in our time. Between all that cooking, along with developing and editing recipes, we have gathered quite a few tips and tricks. Now we’re sharing our collected wisdom with you to help guarantee success the next time you prepare to whip up a batch.
So grab your mixing bowl: It’s time to get started.
Pay attention to temperatures
Many cookie recipes call for room-temperature eggs and butter. Don’t ignore this step, as it’s key to ensuring your cookie dough is properly combined and will incorporate the right amount of air so that they don’t bake up flat. If you didn’t let ingredients rest on the counter, no sweat. You can soften the butter in the microwave in short bursts of 7 to 10 seconds, rotating the butter with each burst, until the butter is soft enough to leave an impression with your fingertip. It shouldn’t show signs of melting. For eggs, place them in a bowl of warm tap water for five minutes.
Mix well
The key to uniform cookies is attentive mixing of the dough. Scrape down the sides of the bowl and your mixer attachment often, especially in between the addition of different ingredients. If the recipe says to cream the butter and sugar, not doing so will affect the texture and appearance of the baked cookie.
Don’t just rely on the timing, as mixer strengths can vary — the visual cues provided in a recipe are just as important, if not more so. Once the dry ingredients are added, go low and slow. This keeps the flour from flying and also prevents the cookies from getting tough. Mix just until the flour disappears. You can even stop a little before that point and finish stirring by hand to avoid overdoing it.
Lining the pan
Beware silicone when lining baking sheets. While we love our silicone baking mats for other projects, they can be problematic with cookies, especially butter
based doughs, by causing them to spread too much. Parchment is a safer bet for properly shaped cookies, and it can be reused multiple times. Save the silicone mats for drier doughs (like macarons, for example) or other times you want nonstick perfection, such as chocolate-dipped treats that need to set.
Portioning the dough
Dishers, or spring-loaded ice cream scoops, make fast, even work of portioning dough. That helps ensure equal-size cookies that bake at the same rate. Even if you don’t have a disher, you can maintain a uniform size by weighing all the dough and dividing by the number of cookies (a good recipe will provide you with the per-cookie weight).
Freeze the dough
If you’re working ahead or don’t want to be stuck with an entire batch of cookies, pop the dough in the freezer. For drop cookies that you’ve formed with a disher, as described above, allow them to freeze individually on a lined baking sheet before transferring to an airtight bag or container. Bake straight out of the freezer.