Wow, it’s December again already, and that means ’tis the season for cookies! So in the spirit of the season, here are a dozen of my favorite cookie tips:

• Follow the recipes and measure carefully. This is especially important for baking the ratio of fats, liquids, and flour affects the texture of the cookie. So level off measuring cups with the back of a knife, and pay attention to the recipe to see if it calls for sifted or unsifted flour. “1 cup sifted flour” means to sift the flour first then measure it. “1 cup flour, sifted” means to measure 1 cup of flour, then sift it.
• Use silver baking sheets… preferably a dual-layer with an air-cushion. Dark baking sheets tend to run hotter than the silver ones, and most professional chefs write recipes using the silver sheets as a guide. The dual-layer baking sheets help to even out the heat so that you don’t get hotspots.
• Use parchment paper or a Silpat. Both make clean-up ridiculously simple.
• Use a cool pan. If you’re making a lot of batches and reuse the baking pan right out of the oven, run it under cold water to cool it down before laying out a new batch. A hot pan will cause the cookie dough to spread and change the cooking time.
• Make a test batch. Make a small batch with just a couple of cookies. From the results of the first batch, you can adjust the heat or better judge the cooking time.
• Roll out even cookies with rubberband spacers on your rolling pin. Rolling out cookies evenly is pretty challenging. To get consistent thickness, you can place fat rubberbands on the rolling pin over each other on both sides of the rolling pin. Place enough rubberbands to get to the desired thickness.
• Use an ice-cream scoop to get uniform cookie sizes. They sell them in different sizes.
• Cool the cookies on a wire rack. Just leaving them on the cookie rack might cause them to cook more, and another flat surface might make the cookies soggy.
• Don’t crowd the cookies. Especially drop cookies which spread a lot as the bake.
• To properly frost a sugar cookie, do the edges then fill in the middle. To do pretty designs when frosting with royal icing and a piping bag, it’s easier to do the outline first and then fill in.
• Don’t overmix the cookie dough. It will make the cookies tougher.
• Tweak the recipe using food science. Figure out what type of cookie you want: chewy, cakey, or crispy. Then follow these hints to get the desired texture:
  Chewy Cookies
  • Use melted butter instead of creaming cold butter.
  • Remove cookies when they look slightly underdone.
  • Use a high ratio of brown sugar to white sugar, or substitue a little liquid sweetener such as honey, molasses, or corn syrup for the same amount of sugar.
  • Use more egg yolk instead of whole eggs.
  • Reduce the amount of baking soda or baking powder. These are leaveners which lend the cookie a more cakey texture.
  Thin, Crispy Cookies
  • Use butter as the main fat. It has a lower melting point than shortening, so the cookie will spread out thinner.
  • Use more white sugar than brown sugar. You could just use all white sugar.
  • Bake cookies until well done.
  Puffy, Cakey Cookies
  • Use shortening instead of butter.
  • Make sure that you mix the shortening well with the sugars until it is very light and fluffy.
  • Use cake flour instead of all-purpose flour.
  • Use more egg.
  • Use baking powder instead of baking soda for leavening. It makes the cookie puff up more.

Click here to search for tons of Christmas cookie recipes…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 14th, 2005 at 7:56 pm and is filed under Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.