As a child you probably believed that baking cookies was an easy task. As an adult, you now realize that baking the perfect cookie is no easy feat. Here are some tips to help you realize your dream of baking the perfect cookie this holiday season!
Choose Quality Ingredients
Like anything else, cookies are only as good as their worst ingredient. If you truly want to bake the perfect batch of cookie, you need to start with the best ingredients. Use real butter instead margarine, real vanilla instead of artificial vanillin. Make sure your ingredients are fresh by buying them from a local farmer’s market. Replace your baking powder to ensure that it’s fresh. Use fresh organic spices, and keep them in the fridge to prolong their shelf life. Using quality ingredients will be sure to yield quality cookies!
Chill your Dough
Joybilee Farms recommends you chill the cookie dough before you bake it to give your batter more body and let your cookies rise a bit higher in the oven. You can even roll the cookies into small balls and freeze them for a few days. Chilling cookie dough before baking solidifies the fat in the cookies, then as the cookies bake, the fat in the chilled cookie dough takes longer to melt than room-temperature fat. And the longer the fat remains solid, the less cookies spread. This will be extremely helpful in producing a uniform batch of delicious cookies!
Bake One Batch at a Time
For the best cookie results, bake one batch at a time, on the middle rack. You will get the best possible results when the oven only concentrates on one batch. If you absolutely need to bake more than one batch at a time, rotate the baking sheets from the top rack to bottom rack a couple times through the baking process to encourage even browning. And turn the sheets around as well. Ovens have hot spots, so you need to work around this.
Bake and Cool
The Food Network suggests baking for the shortest time suggested in the recipe, then checking one cookie from the middle of the baking sheet and one from the edge for doneness. Remember, the cookies will keep cooking once removed from the oven. Let them cool completely on a rack before decorating, and store them in an airtight container.
Every baker sets out to bake the perfect cookies. But unless you start with quality ingredients, chill your dough, bake your cookies one batch at a time and cool them, you will most likely not achieve this. Be sure to follow these helpful hints and you will wow party guests with your perfect cookies!