Tricks to Bake Perfect Cookies Everytime
We LOVE cookies! And, baking cookies is almost as much fun as eating them. Almost. The Old Farmer’s Almanac has ten tips that every cookie baker needs to know to make perfect, delicious cookies every time. Turn on your oven, and let’s get baking!
1. Organize
Clutter is your worst enemy. You can’t bake if the counter is a mess, the bottle of vanilla extract is hiding, and there’s no place to put the cooling rack. Clear your work area before you begin, and get out all the ingredients. Put each one away as you use it so you don’t forget what you’ve used. Rinse bowls and utensils as you go.
2. Read Carefully
Read the recipe through before you do anything. As you read, check your supply of staples (flour, sugar, butter) and watch for any unusual ingredients, steps, or equipment that might trip you up. For example, if the dough has to chill for 12 hours, you should know this before you start in case you need the cookies by noon today.
3. Fresh Ingredients
Insist on good, fresh ingredients. Spices lose their flavor over time; replace them if you’ve had them around since last December. Use fresh local eggs if you can find them. Unsalted (“sweet”) butter is preferable to salted; it tastes cleaner, sweeter, and fresher than salted butter—and often it is. Because salt acts as a preservative, salted butter can be warehoused longer than unsalted.
4. Room Temperature Butter
The butter must be at room temperature—not too cold, or your cookies will be too dense. If you forget to soften your butter ahead of time, cut the stick(s) into thin pats and place them on a room-temperature plate. Leave in a warm spot for 10 minutes or so until the butter yields gently to finger pressure. Not too soft, or it won’t hold up and make a greasy dough instead of a fluffy dough. Even if a recipe calls for softened butter, it doesn’t have to be squishy soft.
5. Properly Toast Nuts
When a recipe calls for toasted nuts, thoroughly cool them before adding them to the dough. (Incidentally, toasted nuts mean 8 to 10 minutes in a 350°F oven.) Adding hot nuts to a dough could melt the butter and drastically change the texture of your cookies, but probably not for the better.
6. Use High-Quality Baking Sheets
If you don’t already own them, buy yourself some good baking sheets. Thin, flimsy sheets don’t diffuse heat well or evenly and can result in scorched cookie bottoms. Tinned steel and anodized aluminum are two good material choices. Neither is inexpensive, but they’ll last. Look for them in gourmet kitchen shops. While you’re there, invest in a heavy-duty stainless steel cooling rack large enough to hold 2 to 3 dozen cookies. Letting your cookies cool directly on the hot pans can lead to over-browning on the bottoms and soggy cookies.
7. One at a Time, Please!
Generally speaking, bake only one sheet of cookies at a time on the center rack. Doing this allows for the most even baking! Cookies may burn too quickly if they’re too high in the oven.
8. Completely Cool Baking Sheets
If you own only one cookie sheet, let your sheet trays utterly cool to room temperature before baking another batch. This prevents the butter from melting out of the dough and puddling up on the sheet.
9. Cool on the Sheet
As a rule, let cookies cool on the baking sheet for 1 to 2 minutes. This is just long enough to firm them slightly and make it easier to slide them off the sheet and onto a rack.
10. Properly Package
And here’s a shipping tip! Most cookies ship well. For best results, however, choose a relatively firm or dense type of cookie. Wrap cookies individually in waxed paper and pack them snugly in a tin. Pack the tin inside a bigger box, cushioned on all sides, with additional waxed paper. And it never hurts to be nice to the postal clerk.
Cook Cookies With the Almanac
Enjoy this video demonstrating some cookie-baking tips—and get into the spirit!
Ready? Browse Our Delicious Cookie Recipes
Now, check out some delicious cookie recipes and enjoy trying out your baking skills!
Ken Haedrich
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I have discovered that you can actually make your cookies in advance, but not bake them. This works well with firm dough type cookies. I put them on the pan but instead of putting them in the oven I freeze them and then put them into freezer bags. Then I take them out when I am ready to bake them and put them back on the pan and into the oven. Fresh baked cookies but without the mess and stress at the holidays. We make the dough on rainy days during the summer. I also do this with my apple pies. Line the pie plate with foil, then the bottom crust, add the pie filling and top with the second crust, then freeze. Remove the whole thing from the pie plate, wrap well and return to the freezer. When ready to bake, remove all the wrapping, pop it back into the pie plate and bake. Yum!
Because my parents always bought apples by the bushel from a nearby orchard each fall, my mother learned how to bake her wonderful apple pies and freeze them (and my Dad, who loved those pies helped by peeling apples for her!). She baked them just as usual at 425 degrees for the first 10 minutes, then reduced the temperature and baked them half the prescribed remaining time, usually 20 minutes (40 minutes total). After freezing, simply return the pie to the oven at 350 degrees and bake until warmed! They were delicious! Now that she's gone, I try to imitate how Mom made her pies!
I love this time saver too! I also cut up small pieces of parchment paper to insert between each frozen cookie before storing them in the freezer bag. That helps facilitate pulling them apart when preparing to bake them. And the parchment pieces can be stored in the empty freezer bag (I just put it back into the freezer) to be used for the next batch of cookies.
Along with organization, consider this tip. I put newspaper under the wire cooling racks. It keeps things more tidy, and you can throw out the paper when you are done.
