Cookies are equally as fun to bake and eat, but they also leave little room for error. Short ingredient lists, basic mixing techniques, and quick baking times mean that a seemingly small mistake can have a massive impact on your cookies.
Whether you’re gearing up for a marathon day of holiday cookie baking, or you’re simply whipping up your favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe, you’ll want to avoid these common mistakes.
1. Not bringing your ingredients to room temperature
Before you preheat your oven or turn on your mixer, be sure that your ingredients are at room temperature, roughly 65° to 70°F. This is essential for the butter (or other non-dairy fat) and eggs in the recipe. During the “creaming” process of mixing, butter, sugar, and eggs are beaten together to aerate dough, which helps to keep your cookies from becoming too dense.
Room temperature butter is soft enough to incorporate air into the dough when beaten with sugar (here’s how to soften butter, fast). Similarly, room temperature eggs will emulsify right into the dough to maintain or build upon this light, delicate structure. The result is that your cookies will have the proper expected texture, whether that’s crisp and chewy, or soft and cakey. If your butter and/or eggs are too cold or warm, your cookies might be unpleasantly hard, heavy, and greasy.
2. Not refrigerating your cookie dough
It might be tempting to get your cookies into the oven as soon as possible so you can, well, eat them sooner. However, if your cookie recipe includes a refrigeration step before baking, you shouldn’t overlook it. This step is crucial for a number of reasons:
- In some cases, it makes your dough easier to work (think soft, delicate Linzer dough).
- It prevents your cookies from spreading in the oven. That means your gingerbread people will look like people, not blobs.
- It deepens and enriches the flavor of your cookies. That nuanced, expensive vanilla extract will pop more.
- It ensures better caramelization — hooray for crispy edges and golden-hued cookies.
- It results in scooped or drop cookies, like chocolate chip cookies or snickerdoodles, with beautifully chewy centers.
If you’re making cookies that are thin and crispy throughout, such as tuiles or biscotti, you don’t need to refrigerate the dough. But in most other cases, even just 30 to 60 minutes in the fridge will give your baked cookies a noticeable upgrade.
3. Overcrowding the oven
I’m all for cooking as efficiently as possible, but don’t bake multiple pans of cookies at once. Your oven’s heat can’t circulate as well with multiple sheet pans that impede airflow. Also, most home ovens can only fit one sheet pan on the middle rack, which is where cookies bake best.
If you want to bake multiple pans of cookies at a time, you have to put the pans on separate racks at different positions in the oven, and that will result in unevenly baked cookies. There are ways around this conundrum, but they involve knowing your oven really well and being able to juggle hot pans of cookies quickly. As the burn scars on my arms will tell you, that doesn’t always work out so well.
4. Opening the oven door during baking
On the subject of ovens, the best thing you can do for your cookies as they bake is to keep the oven door closed. This means no rotating your hot pans, and no cracking the oven door to sneak a peek.
The reason is simple. Cookies spend a relatively short amount of time in the oven. When heat escapes during such a brief span, there’s a good chance that your cookies are in the midst of some critical chemical reaction.
If you absolutely need to bake multiple pans of cookies at a time, or just check on your cookies, it’s best to do so during the last third or half of their baking time. Your cookies will be closer to finished, and you’re less likely to impact their final texture and flavor.
5. Storing all your cookies together
After you’ve spent all that time and effort to bake praise-worthy cookies, remember to store them with other cookies of their kind. There’s nothing worse than being the recipient of a box of holiday cookies, each with their own unique textures and flavors, only to have all the cookies taste the same or become soggy and flavorless. Separate airtight containers are the key. Your cookies will look, and taste, better for them.
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