The Basics of Cookies- It's All Here!

Over the last few years of writing this blog, I have received tons of very specific baking questions; about cookies being flat, or why butter needs to be room temperature, or whatever else it is that befuddles you about baking.  So today I'm going to give you the Cliffs Notes of baking cookies.  It's ALL in here.  You must have caught me in a good mood!  (Or maybe it's the margarita.  Oh, summertime...)

On your ingredients:

Unless you have a recipe that specifically calls for you to keep your ingredients cold, It will always  help if you have your ingredients at room temperature.  This is especially important for eggs and butter.  (See my blog on Why Eggs and Butter are the Axl Rose and Slash of Baking for the science of it)  Eggs and butter don't like to mix together because they're both made mainly of fat, but if you have them at room temperature, they get along better.  Its kind of like those mean girls in sororities who hate each other, but after a few beers they're best friends and crying about how much they love each other.  Heat is the beer in this situation.  It makes everyone a LOT friendlier.

Baking soda, baking powder, and salt are all the same thing- they're forms of sodium.  And under a microscope, sodium and sugar look very similar.  Sodium looks like little glass boxes with perfect corners and sugar looks like a little glass box with a lot of jagged edges.  Both of them help incorporate air into cookies.  We'll get to how much of that you want in a minute.  But cookies recipes that have you cream your butter and sugar together should tell you to cream your sugar, salt, baking soda, and/or baking powder together.  Go ahead and mix sugar, salt, and your baking soda/powder at the beginning and let them join the butter party.  Everyone's invited!

Extra stuff like chocolate chips, oatmeal, raisins, whatever should always be added last.  That means DEAD last.  Wait until you've added your flour and what's in your bowl is the perfect example of cookie dough.  Then you can add your extra stuff.  Why?  Because I said so.  And because it keeps the chocolate chips, fruit, etc in tact so that you get whole bits of delicious surprises as you bite into the cookie.  Oh, and because that extra stuff tears up gluten, which makes your cookie more crumbly.  It's not the end of the world or anything, but if you want to know a brief overview about what the &%!@ gluten is, read this blog.

Baking soda and baking powder are NOT the same!  Read this ancient blog I wrote to find out why.   Make sure you use what your recipe calls for. 

On mixing:

If a recipe tells you to "cream the butter and sugar together," that does not mean that you should beat the shit out of those two ingredients.  With most cookie recipes, you want to just combine the sugar and butter until they're blended.  (Room temperature sugar and butter, remember?  Don't make me repeat myself.)  If you incorporate too much air into the cookie, it spreads out and gets flat and crunchy.  And judging by the emails I get in my in box (which is whatthebleephappened@gmail.com, for all of your fan mail/ questions/ Whole Foods gift card donating needs) you all prefer soft, chewy cookies like we all grew up with out of the Soft Bake package.   Try to hold back.  Just blend the butter and sugar (and salt and baking soda/baking powder) until they're combined.   Then move on to the next step. 

Eggs are usually the next step.  We've already gone over that you've let them get to room temperature.  So now that you've mastered the art of letting an egg sit out on the counter for half an hour or so, make sure you don't add it too fast.  If you have 2 eggs to add to a recipe, add them one at a time.  Add Egg #1, and let the mixer blend it in.  At first the eggs look like they're separated- you'll actually see little fat bubbles that don't want to mix.  But if you're patient, and if your butter and eggs were room temperature, it will eventually blend together.  Then you want to turn the mixer off, take a rubber spatula and scrap all the way down to the bottom of the bowl to make sure you mix in any butter/eggs that have been left alone at the bottom, untouched.  Like little orphans.  Please.  Don't ignore the orphans.  Then, and only then, can you add the next egg.  If you happened to be making the most giant batch of cookies ever and you needed to add 100 eggs, you obviously wouldn't add them 1 at a time.  You'd add them like 1/4 at a time.  Use your common sense here, people. 

On Baking:

Let's talk preheating.  You preheat your oven for a reason, people!  If I can quote myself here from yet another ancient blog, "While a hot oven will force a cake into its submission and make it rise like no one's business, an oven that's not pre-heated will basically just sip a cocktail, nudge your cake and ask, "Do you want to bake or what? Yeah, I didn't think so."  Put your cookies in the oven to BAKE.  If your oven isn't hot, what's the point?  A slow, painful death to the chocolate chips?  There's so much happening: high heat makes water turn into steam which helps things rise, which helps baking soda finish its very important job, which makes sugar caramelize into golden pieces of heaven... Just preheat the damn oven until it beeps at you, ok?  And then give it another 10 minutes or so for good measure. 

Chill the dough before you scoop it out and lay it on a pan.  Even better, scoop it out, lay it on the pan, and then chill it.  Freeze it, even.  This gives you a chewier, softer cookie every time.

Your recipe doesn't always know how long to bake your cookies for.  12-15 minutes doesn't always mean 12-15 minutes.  I remember working a pastry externship at a lovely restaurant in San Francisco with a very lovely chef who went on to star on many a Bravo and Food Network TV shows, and if there's one thing I learned there, its that you don't bake things for a certain amount of time, you bake them until they're done.  Every oven is different.  How cold or hot the weather is affects baking.   Humidity affects baking.  So if your recipe says 12-15 minutes and after 15 minutes you look at your cookies and they're still doughy and undercooked, then leave them in there longer.  WE ALL KNOW WHAT A COOKIE LOOKS LIKE.  Trust yourself to make that decision to say "Yes.  This cookie is finished and I will now remove it from the oven because the time has come."  The same goes for cookies baking much faster than you think.  If those suckers look done at 9 minutes, then you better take them out before their prescribed time of 12-15 minutes.  And if you don't and you burn them, it's your fault.  You saw they were done, didn't you?

If you bake a lot, I recommend investing in a couple of good sheet pans.  Home bakers call them cookie sheets, but we in the industry (or we who used to be in the industry and have since escaped, thank the universe) call them sheet pans.   They're usually made of aluminum, they have durable sides, they're uber sturdy and will last you a gazillion years if you treat them right, and if you line them with parchment paper instead of coating them with butter and flour, they're super easy to clean.  Do yourself a favor and purchase a couple from a restaurant supply store, not Williams Sonoma or Sur la Table.  As much as I love those two stores' cookbook selections, they'll charge you triple for a shopping experience with better lighting.  Not worth it.

On what to do when you've messed up:

Cookies a little over done?  Too much baking soda and the texture is all funky?  No problem.  Freeze it and save it to blend it into a milkshake when you want to eat your feelings.  Crumble it into a bowl and pour milk over it and pretend like you're 8 years old watching Saturday morning cartoons eating a Cookie Crisp.  (God, how I MISS Cookie Crisp.  Damn you, diets!)  Puree it up and use it instead of graham cracker crumbs for a cheesecake crust.  Homemade chocolate chip cookie crust?  You just made like 14 new friends.  Puree it up, freeze it, and rim a martini glass in it for some kind of decadent signature holiday drink.   You can do that with almost anything!  I once drank a martini in a glass rimmed with pretzels.  I don't remember much after that, but I'm pretty sure I enjoyed it.

This is why your friend's mom's cookies don't kick ass anymore

Dear Tricia, My friend's mom bakes awesome oatmeal cookies but, recently they have been coming out thinner than usual.  Why?

3 reasons, and I'll make this quick because I need you to fix that problem, make a new batch, and send them to me pronto.  Words can't describe my love of oatmeal cookies.  I can get seriously ugly on a batch of those suckers.

First, you know how when you bake, you always read to cream the sugar and butter until its light and fluffy, and the butter turns from yellow to almost white?  Well that's a prime example of what you don't want to do with cookies.  Cakes- yes.  Cookies- no.  Over creaming the butter and sugar just makes the cookies spread out more, and they get thinner and flat.  Picture the sugar granules punching little air pockets into the butter- its like watching one of the Kardashians, or Toddlers and Tiaras on TV, and slowly, your brain just gets filled with air.  This is great for cakes, because it makes the cake rise up, but with cookies, it just makes them spread out.  So keep those Kardashians and mini drag queen-looking lady babies away from your cookies. 

Second, make sure your oven is fully pre heated.  Get that oven entirely up to temperature before you even start making the cookies.  If you put a tray of cookie dough into an oven that's not hot enough, the butter just starts to slowly melt out and the texture of your cookies will suck.  If you put your oven into a primed and hot oven, the water inside of the butter evaporates and the steam helps the cookie rise.  Pair that with the baking soda, and your cookies are doing the job they were meant to do.  So give them a nice office to do their job in.  Cookies like heat.  They're like those iguanas, laying out on a scorching hot rock Mexico, soaking it all up, the crazy bastards.

Third, baking soda is what makes cookies spread.  This is important- you need your cookies to spread out a little.  But make sure you're measuring correctly, because extra baking soda means extra spreadage.  And double check that you're using baking soda, not baking powder.  Don't get those 2 confused because they do things totally different.  Read this blog from a billion years ago to find out why.

Ok, suggest those things to your friends mom.  Tactfully, I hope.  You don't want to be all "Your cookies aren't awesome anymore and Tricia said this is why."  And let me know how it turns out!  (After you send me a batch, of course.  Thank you.)

Hyper Hypo Loves Christmas Cookies!

Dear Tricia, I'm getting really (overly) excited about my Christmas cookie baking this year. Here's a few questions for you that may help me with my (over)planning. My whole adult life I have wanted to use cake flour and/or pastry flour. What makes these flours different? Can I use cake flour to make my awesome Christmas cookies? Where can I get really cool sprinkles? The ones found the grocery store are the same ones my grandmother used (circa 1972) and I want something different. Are canned frostings a sin?

Considering I got this email in October, "overly" excited for Christmas might not quite cover it. Obsessively excited, perhaps? Completely enraptured? Either way, thanks for thinking of me in regards to your (over)planning. I'm (over)flattered.
Cake and pastry flours are different than other flours because they have less protein. Flour that has a lot of protein makes things dense and chewy... think bread and pasta. Its kind of like the protein content tells you how much muscle the flour has in it. Bread flour has a lot of muscle (it has about 14% protein content), and that's not what you want in delicate things like cake and cookies. So cake and pastry flours have much less protein (about 8% protein content) and a lot more starch in them. Its like bread flour is one of those oily, overly tanned competitive body builders, and pastry flour is Nancy Reagan. Which one do you think would make a better cake? This is why all purpose flour has its name: the protein content is around 11% so its a happy medium between bread and pastry flours.
You can actually see how much more starchy pastry and cake flours are, compared to bread or all purpose flour. If you hold pastry flour in your hand and squeeze it tight, it will stay together in a tight little clump. Bread flour, because it has less starch and more protein, will just go back into a loose pile in your hand when you squeeze it. I can't even begin to tell you how many times this trick comes in handy when someone has forgotten to label the flour bins correctly in some of the kitchens I've worked in.
As far as which one to use for your cookies, either one would be fine. You probably won't notice much of a difference between cake or pastry flour because the protein content only differs by about 1%.
Its perfectly acceptable to use frosting out of a can. You have my blessing. Considering the fact that you're making your cookies from scratch, I'd say that cheating on the frosting still allows you to say your cookies are homemade. I am a fan of making old school, water-and-powdered-sugar frosting with food coloring in it, but the frosting out of a can is nice because it's really thick.
Sprinkles are coming back in a huge way now that cupcakes are really trendy. Sur La Table, Williams Sonoma, and other specialty cooking stores have a pretty decent selection. But if you know of a cake decorating store nearby, and you have a high tolerance for old ladies in large groups, that's going to be the best option because they won't overcharge you like Sur la Table and Williams Sonoma will. (Paying 8 bucks for a tiny can of sprinkles is ridiculous.) Craft stores also carry a lot of cake decorating items and you should be able to find sprinkles there. I've even found some cool ones on one of my favorite websites, etsy.com. And if you still haven't found anything that suits your fancy, Whole Foods, Central Market, and other specialty grocery stores should have a decent selection, plus theirs are all natural.
Make sure you send in photos of your cookies! I'll put them up on the fan page for What the Bleep Happened to My Rump Roast on facebook.

My Cookies are Vulgar and Offensive

Dear Tricia, Why don't my cookies seem to hold their shape? I want some of the kind you get from a cookie bouquet, but my cookies always spread and look rather vulgar. Or maybe I'm just dirty and think they look vulgar...

Yes, you are vulgar. And frankly, without a little bit of vulgarity, you probably wouldn't read my blog... so don't worry too much about it because I'm certainly not fussing about a little naughtiness.
Let me back up for a second and explain what cookie bouquets are to those who have never lived in the suburbs, or to anyone born after 1994. Cookie bouquets are basic shortbread cookies that are cut into different shapes, baked on lollipop sticks or dowel rods, stuck in a basket, and decorated with colorful frosting. They're meant to look like a bouquet of flowers, but surprise! You can eat them. How clever. In the 90's you saw Cookie Bouquet franchise bakeries that popped up in strip malls all over America, only to close down a few years later. I predict that the cupcake bakery trend is soon to follow. Sorry, Sprinkles Cupcakes. Your overpriced treats can't fool me or the economy.
A traditional cookie recipe focuses mainly on flavor and texture, so they're guaranteed to spread out to give you a non-descript blob to decorate. Cookie bouquet cookies are meant for looks, so there is a specific recipe that you need to follow to give you a sturdy, firm, non-vulgar product that won't change shape when it bakes. To get this recipe, I contacted my Aunt Mary, cake-decorator extraordinaire and cookie bouquet expert. (She also used to make my birthday cakes when I was a kid, including a super sweet Ziggy cake, c. 1987.) This is the recipe she swears by:

3 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp. Baking Powder
1/2 tsp. Salt
1 1/2 cups Sugar
2 sticks (8 oz) butter or margarine
2 eggs
1 1/2 tsp. Vanilla

Mix flour, baking powder and salt in medium bowl. Set aside.
Cream margarine and sugar until just combined .
Add eggs, one at a time until well blended.
Add vanilla.
Add flour mixture a little at a time until all ingredients are blended.
Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 1 hour.
Roll dough out 1/4" thick. Cut out shapes. (This makes cookies thick enough to push skewers into the cookie dough to make cookie bouquets).
Bake at 350' for 8-10 minutes (until cookie edge turns light brown). Dough can be refrigerated for up to 2 weeks.

This is a very simple recipe to follow, but I just wanted to stress a few things, and you should already know them if you're a regular reader:
You have to preheat your oven. To quote myself in one of my older blog posts, "Is your oven pre-heated? While a hot oven will force a cake into its submission and make it rise like no one's business, an oven that's not done pre-heating will basically just sip a cocktail, nudge your cake and ask, "Do you want to bake or what? Yeah, I didn't think so." Just let the oven do its work and wait until its hot before you put anything in.
Do not over-cream your butter and sugar. With cakes and cupcakes, you need to cream butter and sugar until they're light and fluffy, but with cookies, its a really bad idea (just like that train wreck of a reality show, Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Why are those people famous again?) because it makes the cookies spread out and get really flat. Then weird, blobby vulgarity ensues, and that's exactly what you're trying to avoid here, right? (Wait... let me double check... um.... yes, that's what you wrote me for.)
Apparently these cookies freeze really well after they're baked, so if you're really busy you can make them ahead of time and decorate them later. I definitely fall into that category, seeing as how I just downloaded two new games for my Wii. Seriously, there just aren't enough hours in the day.
For more edible vulgarity, please go check out my best friend's erotic candy company, Randi Candies, at www.randicandies.com. The gummy boobs are delicious.

I Burned my Bottoms!

Dear Tricia, The last time I baked cookies, the bottoms were burned. I followed the recipe and baked them for how long it told me to, but the bottoms were almost black. What happened?

Ahhh.... the ultimate What the Bleep Happened question... I love fix-its! So, you burned your bottoms, huh? Fortunately, this is easy enough to solve, so I'll try to keep the sarcasm and bitterness to a low since this dilemma is quite common. But keep in mind that I'd usually mercilessly make fun of you for at least 2 paragraphs.
First and foremost, your oven temperature may be incorrect. I know... its mean for an oven to tell you its at 350 degrees when its actually at 410, but this is all too common. But much like Republicans, ovens are frequently wrong and you have to learn how to deal with them on their own terms. But we'll save that as a last ditch effort. On to the more common fix its.
Are you using an old-school cookie sheet? You know... that dark and rusty one that your grandmother gave you or the one that your mom got at a garage sale and gave you when you moved into your first apartment? Cookie sheets that are aluminum (and a large chunk of older or cheap ones are aluminum) conduct more heat than stainless steel ones. Its like your oven is a dance club and your aluminum cookie sheet is wearing an outfit made entirely by Ed Hardy: It yields a hot mess of terrible results. Stainless steel is the way to go. In the restaurant industry, we call them "sheet pans" and you can buy stainless steel half sheet pans that fit beautifully in your oven and give you incredible results with baking. You can get two for like 20 bucks at Sam's Club. And if you're still getting burned bottoms, use both sheet pans and double them up.
When you get your beautiful new half sheet pans, you'll also want to invest in some parchment paper. Its something else that we in the restaurant business swear by. You can find it in the baking aisle of your grocery store near the aluminum foil and it also comes rolled up in a little box just like foil. Tear off a sheet of parchment paper to line your sheet pan. You can make it stick by lightly spraying some Pam on the pan. Parchment paper doesn't usually need to be greased when you're baking cookies, so just put your dough straight on the parchment and that should give you perfect cookie color on the bottoms, free of a burned mess.
Have you mixed your cookie dough entirely? While you don't want to over mix your dough (that makes it spread out and get flat), making sure that the sugar is fully incorporated is super important because big chunks of sugar that have fallen to the bottom of the cookie dough will burn. If you ever see burned streaks on the bottom of the cookie, its most likely from sugar that wasn't mixed in all the way.
Also, make sure you're putting your cookies on the middle or top shelf of the oven, further away from the heating element. This was a confusing topic of debate in one of my older blogs, "Top or Bottom: Which is Hotter?", but for cookies, get on top. This helps many different... situations.
Back to your oven temperature being wrong: if none of the previous helpers are working for you, then your oven isn't calibrated correctly. You could try buying an oven thermometer to check the real temperature of the oven and the adjust the temperature from there. But if you're broke like me (and that goes for you, Mr.-Judgmental-Convenience-Store-Guy-Who-Gives-Me-Dirty-Looks-For-Buying-Cheap-Wine), turn it down about 20 degrees and give it a go. I think you'll find that very helpful.

The Scary Comfort of Mall-Sized Cookies

Dear Tricia, Thank you for your blog about comfort food, however when I need comfort food, I look for something like chocolate cake, a mall sized chocolate chip cookie, or anything slathered in Nutella. Any help?


If I'm going with the basis of my last comfort food blog and assuming that you want something that won't add cellulite to your butt cheeks, then yes I can help you. The Nutella thing throws a wrench in my research, but we'll get to that later.
Welcome to my office. I'm sorry you are currently in need of comfort and its namesake food. Please come in and make a white wine spritzer: I'm already one ahead of you.
Mall size chocolate chip cookies are indeed a comfort when you're in need. And I'm sorry, but Its just plain mean to put up those Great American Cookie kiosks in the middle of the mall so that there's no escape when your blood sugar plummets while shopping, you get a whiff of chocolate chip heaven, and somehow levitate and then float over to the cookies without any recollection of it whatsoever. Those cookie guys deserve to be punished. Or maybe they deserve a medal, I'm not sure. So, what I've found is a recipe for an olive oil cookie that you can bake at home into your own mall sized cookie. Its lower in fat, and the fat is unsaturated and actually good for you. The cookie dough doesn't include chocolate because most of my readers are looking for quick and convenient recipes, and the olive oil chocolate chip cookie recipes all have about 26 ingredients in them. I'm pretty sure if you're in need of comfort food you're not in the mood to go grocery shopping for 26 ingredients. So, its a sugar cookie. We'll get to the chocolate chips after.
Here's your ingredients:

1 cup sugar
1/3 cup olive oil
1 tablespoon vanilla
Two egg whites
2-1/2 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 cup skim milk

Mix up the first four ingredients in a bowl.
Mix up the flour, salt, and baking soda. Add half of them to the bowl and stir it up.
Add half of the milk and stir it up.
Add the other half of the flour, salt, and baking soda. Stir it up.
Add the rest of the milk, stir it up.

(I know the whole stirring in half the flour and half the milk, etc., seems like a pain in the ass. You want to just dump it all in there, right? Well I promise you this saves you time, elbow grease, and extra cleaning up. Trust me. Or don't. But when you waste your precious time that could be spent at Happy Hour, and 12 Clorox cleaning wipes, I'll be the first one to say I told you so.)

Take the dough out of the bowl and wrap it up in plastic wrap. Put it in the refrigerator for about half an hour before you roll it out. While you're doing that, make another white wine spritzer and preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Roll out the dough about 1/4" thick. If you don't have a rolling pin, just use a can of pan spray or a bottle of liquor. You probably have at least one of those, right? Don't use a can of something inedible (like hairspray) just in case you have bad hand-eye coordination and might get it on the food. No one likes AquaNet cookies.

Here's the fun part: Don't cut the dough. Transfer it on to a buttered cookie sheet and bake it as a mall-sized cookie. Bake it for about 10-12 minutes, or until the edges start to turn brown. Beautiful.

To top your comfort cookie, get an 8 oz container of fat free cream cheese. Beat it real good, like the domestic abuse guys say in the back of the squad car on C.O.P.S., and add about a 1/4 cup of sugar. Beat it until its light and fluffy and spread it on top of your mall sized cookie. And on top of that, you're going to sprinkle MINI chocolate chips. The reason why you want to buy mini chocolate chips is because you get chocolate in every bite but don't have to use as many because they're not as big as regular sized chocolate chips. The portion size is naturally smaller... so try not to use the entire bag, okay? Even in your state of distress, remember this blog and try to resist.
Okay, so what you have there is a mall sized cookie, a basic fat free cream cheese frosting, and your precious little chocolate chips. It's not calorie-free or sugar-free, but come on... I'm not God.
Now for your Nutella request... at 100 calories per tablespoon, this stuff is NOT healthy. Delicious, I know... but it has serious potential to take you on an express train to Cellulite City. So here's what I say when it comes to needing a vehicle for a fatty topping to your mouth: use fruit. It has natural sugar instead of processed high fructose death wish, and it has lots of fiber so you'll feel full faster, along with lots of good vitamins and minerals. When you're buying the ingredients for your mall-sized comfort cookie, go buy a pint of strawberries for dipping into Nutella. Or some bananas, or maybe a mango. Whatever suits your fancy, Fancy Pants.
I hope this helps your need of comfort food! If it doesn't, I'm always ready for another challenge in the battle against big butt cheeks. Just try me...