Culinary expert Colleen Miner shares various tips for baking delicious cookies from scratch.
- If little fingers can't stay out of the dough during preparation, make sure you use pasteurized eggs.
- Make cookies roughly the same thickness to ensure even baking. Use a small ice-cream scoop to make sure they are all the same size. If your scoop is too large, simply use a soup spoon and push off with your finger.
- Grease cookie sheets only when the recipe calls for it because some cookies have a high amount of butter in the recipe and therefore grease themselves. Also, only use a nonstick pan when it is specifically required. When greasing is required, do so lightly and evenly, using a paper towel or crumpled wax paper saturated with vegetable oil or butter.
- Various kitchen utensils can be used to make an imprint on cookies. For instance, using a bottle opener with the tip facing in and with the pointed side up while going around the edges of the cookies gives them a star-like pattern. A cheese grater gives cookies a scaled effect, and a straw will easily punch holes in dough. Other options include various ends of a meat tenderizer, press a veggie crinkle, etc.
- Use cookie sheets that are at least two inches smaller in length and width than your oven. This way the air circulates properly and the cookies will cook well.
- If you don't have a convection oven, for best results, bake only one cookie sheet at a time on the center rack of oven. If baking two sheets at a time, rotate halfway through baking for even baking.
- To prevent over-baking, remove the cookies from the sheets as soon as you take them out of the oven because the pan is still hot and continues the baking process within the cookie.
- If you are making multiple batches, cool cookie sheets to room temperature before placing more dough on them. A hot cookie sheet will melt the bottom of the batter and ruin the cookie. Use multiple cookie sheets so you can be cooling and preparing while others are cooking.
- If you're short on time, freeze dough for baking later, or freeze drop cookies individually by placing them on cookie sheets and flash freezing. Once frozen, transfer the dough to heavy duty press-and-seal plastic bags.
- To eliminate the time-consuming task of dropping the cookie dough, simply fill an 11 x 14-inch sheet cake pan with the dough and, pat down. Let bar-type cookies cool briefly in the pan to set before cutting. This will keep them from crumbling.
- Use a dough scraper when cutting bar cookies. It cuts them neatly in the pan, and it makes it easy to lift cookies out.
- You can freeze baked cookies for up to three months, but after that, the taste may be a little stale.
