60+ Cookie Dough Recipes! (2024)

FAQs

What does too much brown sugar do to cookies? ›

Brown sugar adds a beautiful color as well as a more complex flavor. They'll also make cookies chewier, softer, and thicker than white sugar. Adding too much can result in dark brown cookies. Adding too little results in paler cookies.

Something else happens as the dough rests: part of the flour breaks down into its component parts, including a simple carbohydrate, sugar. Thus, since sugar is a flavor enhancer (like salt), the cookies may taste more flavorful, as well as sweeter after aging.

When the cookie dough reaches 92 degrees, the butter starts to melt and all the water trapped inside the butter turns into steam. Since the butter is melting, the cookie dough starts to look like it's melting too and starts transforming from a round ball to a flatter cookie-like shape.

In that role, white sugar aerates the dough when creamed with butter for thick and puffy cookies. Brown sugar, meanwhile, is dense and compacts easily, creating fewer air pockets during creaming—that means that there's less opportunity to entrap gas, creating cookies that rise less and spread more.

Regarding the extra acidity of dark brown sugar, acid activates baking soda, so if you use dark brown sugar to make, say, cookies, your cookies will rise higher, but only slightly.

What Does Cream of Tartar Do in Cookies? Cream of tartar makes cookies chewy, as it precludes the sugar in the dough from crystalizing, which would lead to crispiness (ie: the opposite of chewiness).

Putting cookie dough into the freezer before baking can help solidify the fat from the butter in your cookies, which in turn keeps them from spreading too much in the oven. Colder dough will not expand as much as warm dough does. This will produce a higher, thicker cookie.

Follow the expiration date on the package, but if there isn't one, you can add one generous week to the “best-by” date. Homemade dough, when stored in an airtight container, is best to use within 3-5 days, but may be good up to one week.

Popping your dough in the fridge allows the fats to cool. As a result, the cookies will expand more slowly, holding onto their texture. If you skip the chilling step, you're more likely to wind up with flat, sad disks instead of lovely, chewy cookies. Cookies made from chilled dough are also much more flavorful.

The longer you chill the dough, the more flavor will develop. The flour will also absorb more of the moisture so the thicker and chewier the final texture will be.

Why can you eat Pillsbury cookie dough? ›

Both the flour and the egg ingredients should be cooked for food safety reasons. What makes Pillsbury's refrigerated cookie and brownie doughs ready to eat raw? We use heat treated flour and pasteurized eggs so you can now safely enjoy our cookie dough baked or raw. Pillsbury Cookie Dough Poppins contains no egg.

If there isn't enough egg, your batter or dough may not be able to hold its structure or could end up overly dry or dense. On the other hand, if there is too much egg, your baked goods could lose their shape due to excess liquid, or have a rubbery (or even overly cakey) texture depending on the recipe.

350° is the standard temp for a cookie, and it's a great one. Your cookies will bake evenly and the outside will be done at the same time as the inside. Baking at 325° also results in an evenly baked cookie, but the slower cooking will help yield a chewier cookie. The outsides will be a little softer, too.

Baking hard cookies at ≥185 °C oven temperature for ≥16 min will result in >5 log CFU/g reductions in Salmonella. Baking soft cookies at ≥165.5 °C oven temperature for ≥22 min will result in >5 log CFU/g reductions in Salmonella.

More importantly, even if you manage to break it into bits, hard brown sugar is, well, hard. This problem means it won't dissolve and mix evenly into your batter. When your baked goods come out of the oven, they're likely to have little brown sugar pellets.

Brown sugar is often used in baking for the flavor and moistness it adds to baked goods. The molasses in brown sugar also helps to prevent cookies and cakes from drying out. It generally makes baked goods softer and moister.

Brown sugar, on the other hand, contains more moisture and is slightly acidic, so cookies made with mostly brown sugar will be chewier and rise higher (because the baking soda reacts to the acid in the sugar).