The Baking Answer Book (23 page)

Be patient and careful when removing hot cookies from a baking sheet.
Some types of cookies are very soft when they come out of the oven. It’s best to let them firm up for a few minutes on the baking sheet before attempting to transfer them. When you do transfer them, use a wide spatula with a thin metal blade to get right under the cookies without damaging them. Very soft cookies may droop over a spatula that isn’t wide enough to hold them, and then break. Rubber and silicone spatulas, which are thicker than metal pancake turner-type spatulas, might break the cookies as you attempt to lift them from the sheet. Spatula size is irrelevant if you line your baking sheets with parchment paper—then you can simply slide the parchment paper, with the cookies on top of it, right onto a wire rack to cool immediately. When your cookies are cool, they will effortlessly peel away from the paper.

Q
What is the best way to soften butter if I’m in a hurry to bake cookies?

A
Butter takes about 30 minutes to soften to a pliable but not melty stage, between 65 and 68°F (18–20°C) on an instant-read thermometer. (On a warm day this might take less than 30 minutes. If your kitchen is very cool, it will take longer.) To hasten the process, cut the butter into small pieces and lay it out on a flat surface such as a cutting board or plate. This should cut the softening time by half. The more of the butter’s surface that is exposed to room-temperature air, the more quickly it will soften. Another method you might try is to grate cold butter on the large holes of a box grater. But be careful that the heat of your hands doesn’t melt the butter as you grate it.

Professional pastry chefs often soften butter manually, by repeatedly pounding it with a rolling pin, when they need it to be pliable but still cold (as when making the butter packet for puff pastry, see
page 278
). To do this at home, cut your butter into pieces and place the pieces between two sheets of wax paper or parchment before gently pounding with a rolling pin, flipping the paper so you pound each piece once or twice on each side. Lazy bakers with a KitchenAid or other powerful mixer might consider simply cutting the butter into pieces and softening it manually by beating it with the paddle attachment before adding sugar to the bowl.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

This recipe calls for melted butter, which will cause the cookies to spread, rather than puff up, as they bake. Use mini chocolate chips, which work better in the flat cookies than regular-size chips.

MAKES 32 COOKIES

½ teaspoon baking soda

¼ teaspoon salt

14 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled

¾ cup granulated sugar

½ cup packed light brown sugar

1 large egg

2½ cups old-fashioned (not quick-cooking) oats

1.
Preheat the oven to 350°F (180°C). Line several baking sheets with parchment paper.

2.
Whisk the flour, baking soda, and salt in a mixing bowl.

3.
Combine the butter, granulated sugar, and brown sugar in a large mixing bowl, using an electric mixer on low to stir until blended. Beat in the egg and vanilla until incorporated.

4.
With the mixer still on low, add the flour mixture, ½ cup at a time, until incorporated. Stir in the oats and chips.

5.
Drop heaping tablespoonfuls of the dough onto the baking sheets, at least 2½ inches apart. Bake the cookies, one sheet at a time, until they are golden around the edges and just set in the centers, 12 to 15 minutes.

6.
Slide the cookies, still on the parchment paper, onto wire racks to cool completely.

Q
Can I substitute vegetable shortening for the butter in a cookie recipe? How will the cookies differ from cookies made with butter?

A
Vegetable shortening in an equal amount will work in any cookie recipe calling for solid butter, but there will be differences in both texture and flavor. Cookies made by creaming shortening with sugar will rise higher and have a lighter texture than cookies made by creaming butter with sugar. Shortening captures more air during creaming than butter, and already contains gas bubbles which will expand during baking. But even if you prefer light, high cookies to flat, chewy ones, I would beg you to stick with butter. Vegetable shortening is neutral in flavor, adding nothing to the taste of your cookies. Butter not only adds its own fantastic flavor but also enhances the flavors of the other ingredients, making your chocolate more chocolaty and your spices more piquant.

Q
I microwaved my butter to soften it, and it partially melted. Can I refrigerate it until it solidifies and then use it in cookie dough?

A
I don’t recommend softening butter in the microwave for exactly this reason. The risk of melting is just too high. Melting causes the milk solids and water in butter to separate from the butterfat. This separation will affect the way the butter interacts with sugar when the two are beaten together, and in the oven, will affect the structure of your
cookies. Refrigerating the butter until it solidifies again will not restore it to its previous emulsified state.

So what should you do if this happens? It depends on the recipe and your taste. Many recipes specifically call for creamed butter to give the finished cookies a relatively puffy shape and light texture. If this is the case with your recipe, then set aside the melted butter for another use (put it on tonight’s vegetables or make some garlic bread to go with dinner) and start over with solid butter. But melted butter doesn’t necessarily spell disaster for a cookie recipe, the way it most certainly does for, say, a pound cake that relies on air trapped in the cold butter to rise. If you don’t mind chocolate chip cookies that are flat and chewy (some people prefer them this way) rather than puffed and soft, then you can replace solid butter with melted butter in your recipe and enjoy the results very much.

Q
My recipe calls for softened butter. Should my eggs be at room temperature, too?

A
Experienced cake bakers are careful to bring all liquid ingredients, including eggs, to room temperature along with their butter. Room temperature eggs are just as important when making cookie dough. Even if your butter is properly softened and creamed to a light, fluffy state with the sugar, your batter will curdle if you then add very cold eggs. Remove your eggs from the refrigerator when you remove your butter. Or bring them to room temperature by placing them in a bowl of hot tap water for 5 minutes.

Q
How do I know when my butter and sugar are properly creamed together?

A
These ingredients go through several stages before they reach the creamed stage. At first your butter and sugar mixture will be chunky. Then it will be sandy. Soon afterward, it will look like the mixer is flattening the butter and sugar against the sides of the bowl. Then, after 2 or 3 minutes, you will notice that the butter has lightened from pale yellow to off white, and the mixture has become fluffy, due to the air that you have beaten into the butter with the aid of the sugar crystals — now it is properly creamed.

Q
Is it necessary to sift the dry ingredients together before adding them to the creamed butter mixture?

A
Sifting was important in the days before flour was presifted during packaging and contained lumps that needed to be broken up before using. But today’s flour is lump-free, so sifting is not a concern. When I write a cookie recipe, I do direct readers to combine all of the dry ingredients — flour,
baking powder, baking soda, salt — in a mixing bowl and whisk them together before adding them to the liquid ingredients. Whisking helps to evenly distribute the leaveners and salt throughout the cookie dough. I do use my fine strainer to sift cocoa powder into the bowl if it is included in the dry ingredients, because it is not presifted and often contains pesky lumps.

Q
I just realized I’m out of brown sugar. What will happen if I use granulated sugar in my chocolate chip or oatmeal cookie recipe instead?

A
You can replace brown sugar with white sugar. Just be aware that your cookies will be more crisp, because white sugar has less moisture than brown, and they won’t have that hint of molasses flavor from the molasses in brown sugar. Likewise, you can swap brown sugar for white sugar in cookie recipes, keeping in mind that your cookies will be more moist and chewy than cookies made with white sugar alone. Also, light and dark brown sugar can be used interchangeably, with dark brown sugar giving your cookies a more intense molasses flavor.

Q
I’d like to give my drop cookies a more professional look. What is the best way to shape them so they come out of the oven uniform and beautiful?

A
I rely on my #40 ice cream scoop (see Resources) to make perfectly round chocolate chip, oatmeal, and other drop cookies. For extra-large cookies, I use a #16 scoop, which holds about ¼ cup of dough. Dipping the scoop into the batter and then scraping it against the side of the bowl to flatten the bottom ensures that each cookie will be exactly the same size, and each one will be perfectly rounded.

Q
I underbaked my chocolate chip cookies as you suggest in your recipe (
page 162
), but now that they are cooled, I realize they are way too soft. Can I return them to the oven at this point?

A
Absolutely. Drop cookies like these can be crisped up in the oven with a minute or two of additional baking, even after they’ve cooled.

Q
My daughter is allergic to nuts. Can I just leave the nuts out of a drop cookie recipe and proceed?

A
Nuts don’t just add flavor to cookie dough — they contribute to the cookies’ texture and volume, and also affect the recipe’s yield. If you simply leave out the nuts, be aware that your cookies won’t have the same shape (they’ll probably spread a little more), and you’ll get fewer cookies in the end. To maintain the recipe’s balance, you can substitute an equal amount of another add-in, such as chocolate chips or raisins.

Q
The last few chocolate chip cookies I portion out never have any chocolate chips. Are there any tricks to preventing this?

A
Here are two tips: As you are portioning out your dough, regularly scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula, incorporating the dough stuck to the sides (which doesn’t have any chips) into the larger mass containing all of the chocolate chips. And keep a tablespoon or two of chocolate chips in reserve when adding the bulk of them to the dough, to mix into the dough you have remaining at the end.

Q
Can any drop cookie recipe become a bar cookie recipe and vice versa?

A
Most drop cookies can become bar cookies. It will be up to you to figure out what size pan you’ll need and how long they’ll need to bake. To give you an idea, a standard chocolate chip cookie dough recipe contains 2¼ cups of flour, 1½ cups of sugar, and 2 eggs. This amount of cookie dough is just right for a 9-by 13-inch pan or two 8-inch square pans. Just spread the dough evenly across the bottom of a pan lined with nonstick foil and bake until a few moist crumbs stick to a toothpick inserted into the center. You don’t want to spread the dough too thin when making bar cookies, or your bars will dry out.