Cookie Baking - The Basics

Most cookie recipes are made up of two parts-the wet ingredients and the dry ones. Select two bowls. All ingredients will end up in the larger, wet ingredients bowl. These wet items include butter and sugar (sugar liquifies when baked), eggs, milk, sour cream, extracts and syrups like honey or molasses. Butter and sugar are the tenderizers of most cookie recipes. They are creamed together to pump air into them. The longer you mix them, the more air is pumped in and the more tender the cookie. Cream at 2-3 minutes to lighten the dough.

Eggs bind all the ingredients together. If you have ever wondered why instructions suggest room temperature eggs, it is because cold eggs will burst the air bubbles you just spent the last three minutes pumping into the butter and sugar. You can hurry this warming process along by letting the eggs sit in warm water for 15 minutes, while preparing the rest of the ingredients and getting your cookie sheets and other tools out. It is always best to beat an egg first, before adding it to the creamed mixture. Again, it is a matter of pumping in more air. Extracts are usually added to the wet ingredients after creaming and after adding the eggs.

Cookie Bake

The dominant dry ingredient is flour, which is the toughener or structure of the cookie. Think of a honeycomb. The pockets of honey are the air-filled creamed butter and sugar of a cookie. The combs themselves are the flour or structure of the cookie. The egg is the glue that holds them all together.

Flour is usually the single largest ingredient in a cookie recipe. Unlike the wet ingredients, over handling or over beating flour can toughen a cookie, especially if you use a butter substitute with a lower fat content. No need to sift the flour. But if it has been sitting in a container for quite a while, fluff it up (stir it) with a whisk before measuring it. When measuring ingredients, always level off the measuring cup.

Other dry ingredients are insignificant in their size, but powerful in determining not only texture, but taste. If baking a bar type cookie that falls in the center, it usually means you have added too much of a leavening agent (baking powder or baking soda). If your batter puffs up, you need to increase your leavening agent. Spices, on the other hand, have little effect on the texture of the cookie or bar, but have everything to do with flavor. Salt acts as a flavor enhancer. If you are using a salted butter or spread, you need not add more salt to the recipe. To ensure a good blending always whisk leavening agents and spices into the flour.

Add the dry ingredients to the wet ones. Fruits and nuts are usually stirred or folded in by hand as the final step. Chilling a cookie dough is usually a good idea. It makes it easier to handle for scooping and it allows the spices and flavorings that you added to saturate the dough-more saturation means more flavor.

These are the basics when it comes to cookie baking. There is a delicate balance between wet and dry ingredients. Sometimes ignorance is bliss and you do not have to understand chemistry to bake a cookie. It all appears simple when you see that cookies are made up primarily of butter, sugar and flour. But when you start experimenting with a recipe on your own and tip the dry and wet balance, it is then that you appreciate the fine balance and chemistry that makes each seemingly simple recipe work.

Cookie Baking - The Basics

Copyright 2010 by Linda K. Murdock.

Linda K. Murdock is the author of A Busy Cook's Guide to Flavor-Packed Cookies & Bars. A sequel to her best selling A Busy Cook's Guide to Spices, she continues to encourage people to experiment with spices and flavorings. Her new book includes easy recipes for Eggnog, Root Beer, Banana Cream, Cheesecake and 59 other flavored cookies. The book gives you the option of baking either a bar or a cookie for almost every flavor and makes suggestions on how to enhance flavor and decrease unhealthy additives. She includes lots of helpful hints and a question and answer guide to make cookie baking more enjoyable. To learn more go to http://bellwetherbooks.com

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