1. Use parchment paper. Parchment paper is available at any grocery store in the aisle where you find plastic wrap. Just tear off a sheet, and you can use it the whole time you are baking the cookies. Cookies do not stick to it, and it makes it easier to take them off the pan to put them on cookie cooling racks.
2. Use ice cream scoops. They come in many sizes to accommodate how big or how small you want your cookies. When you scoop your cookie dough with ice cream scoops, it gives them a uniform shape and size for cooking more evenly rather than having big cookies that do not cook all the way through or having smaller cookies that become crispy critters. Melon ball scoops work well for miniature cookies.
3. When making a cookie dough that has to be chilled; chill it in log shapes. When the dough is in log shapes, all you have to do is slice and bake. The cookies come out uniform slices for cooking evenly and makes it easy to place on cookie sheet and bake them faster than scooping. They also hold their shape better.
4. Make sure your oven is registering the correct temperature. Sometimes ovens get out of sync with what temperature you set it to and what it actually heats up to. If there is a doubt if your oven is registering the correct temperature, then put a thermometer inside the oven and heat it up. Then, read the temperature on the thermometer and make sure it is right. If it is wrong, either calibrate your oven by the oven manual's directions, have it serviced by a trained technician, or adjust the temperature to where it is registering the right temperature that you need so you can bake your cookies. Then have it looked at later. Nothing is worse than not knowing that your oven is at the wrong temperature until your cookies come out burnt to a crisp or barely cooked at all.
5. Make sure the oven rack is in the center position before turning on your oven. Oven rack placement is vital to cookies either being burnt on the bottom from it being too low and not cooked on the top or not getting all the way done because the rack is too high. Such an easy tip that many overlook until they are wondering what is wrong with their cookies.
6. Always preheat the oven first. If you put the cookies in the oven before the oven is heated, cookies will not get baked all the way. The reason cookies become hockey pucks is because you keep adding time to cookies that are not getting baked in their own allotted time. That happens when you do not preheat the oven all the way first.
7. Let the cookies stand about 1-2 minutes before removing them to wire cooling racks. This allows the cookies to settle and harden a little bit so they are easier to remove from the cookie sheet. If you remove them too soon, they fall apart. I like my cookies whole so I wait a couple minutes before taking them off so they stay in one piece.
8. You can freeze cookie dough. If you want homemade cookies, but do not want so many of them all at once; then you can freeze the dough. Get yourself a food sealer and some bags or canisters that you can vacuum seal and you are in business. Stores are also selling a do it yourself sealer made by Reynolds that does a wonderful job of vacuum sealing bags for a lower cost than buying a regular sealer, if cost is an issue. That way your cookie dough doesn't get freezer burned and you can just bake a few at a time, rather than have 5 dozen cookies laying around.
9. This one is probably the no-brainer of the bunch...FOLLOW THE RECIPE EXACTLY. Many times cookies do not turn out because a person did not follow their recipe. The person who made the recipe knows how much of dry ingredients versus wet ingredients go together to make a cookie dough that comes out of the oven into edible cookies. Trust them. Do not start substituting ingredients to make it lowfat or reduced sugar or something else, because chances are it will not turn out. Do not substitute applesauce for butter or cake flour for all purpose flour, because they are different densities and it will make your cookie flop. Besides, chances are if you are making cookies anyway... you probably are not caring about lowfat, or low sugar, or anything else except something sweet to eat that tastes good.
Brenda Campbell is a cook/baker/homemaker that runs a cooking blog at http://www.cre8tivekitchen.blogspot.com - for more information about cooking tips and free recipes, give her a visit! Thank you for reading my article.
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