When I bake cookies they tend to be flatter than other “professional” cookies. How can I solve this? And do you have a good recipe for snickerdoodles?
Hungry,
The Hatter in Wonderland
Dear Hatter,
Most of the time, when a cookie recipe is coming out of the oven too flat, the fat to flour ratio is probably off- two things you can do to remedy this problem are to make sure your butter is not overly soft- you don't want it to be so cold that it wears out the motor of your mixer, but it shouldn't be so warm that it goes "Ploooshppp" limply in your hand when you try to pick it up. It should be able to hold its shape against very gentle touch. The second thing you can do is add a bit of flour. I know it can be difficult for a novice baker to know how much flour to add, so here's a super simple trick: When it's come together, most cookie doughs should be just tacky to the touch, but not leave any residue on your fingertip- like a post-it note. If you're close to finishing the mixture and it's still gooey enough to leave a bit of dough on your finger, add about 1/4 cup of flour slowly as it's mixing until you can touch it without getting any dough on you.
As for the snickerdoodle recipe, I'm not one to give away ALL my secrets, but I'll be happy to share one excellent recipe with you:
Ingredients:
1 cup Butter
1.5 cups Sugar
2 Eggs
1/2 tsp Vanilla Extract
1/4 tsp Salt
1 tsp Baking Soda
2.75 cups All Purpose Flour
Directions:
"Cream" together the butter and the sugar (combine until they are one- for this particular recipe you can use softer butter, but if you do, chill the dough before rolling and baking it.)
Add the eggs and vanilla and mix until fully combined, but no longer.
Add the remaining ingredients and mix until just incorporated- over mixing makes for tough cookies!
In a bowl, combine 2 tbsp of cinnamon with 1-1.5 cups of sugar. I like to add a dash of nutmeg just to make mine a little more unique than other recipes, too.
Roll the dough into balls about 2" in diameter, and toss them in the cinnamon-sugar mixture.
Place the balls evenly spaced on a cookie sheet and bake in a 350F oven for 5 minutes, then turn the pan and bake for another 3-5 minutes until the cracks in the cookie are not visibly glossy and the very edges of the cookies are beginning to turn golden.
Thank you for the excellent question, and I encourage all my readers to continue sending in their wonderful questions to asksuzyadvice@gmail.com, or just click the "email us" link on the right hand side of the page. Beginning this week I've decided to slow the pace of my posts to about 3 times a week, in order to favor quality of content over frequency and to hopefully get a little more consistency in my posting times. Thank you for reading and I do hope you'll share this blog on your social networking sites if you're enjoying the content.
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