Cookie Making Tips #2: Don't Overmix

Overmixing is a common problem when making cookies, especially if you have a stand mixer. As a child, I always used a large bowl and a hand mixer, so over doing it was never a problem! Now, however, I have a great Kitchen Aid appliance, which makes my life much easier, but also makes it easier to overmix my cookie dough.

The gluten in flour creates a strong network when moistened and mixed well. It gives food a chewy, elastic quality. It also gives food substance and strength, and helps it keep its shape. This is why bread must be kneaded prior to baking.

With cookies, however, elasticity and strength are not a good thing. Cookies, for the most part, should be soft and chewy. They should be more cake-like than bread-like. Therefore, when you mix cookie dough, be careful! If there is a fair amount of mixing to be done (and there rarely is), do it before you add the flour. Once flour is added to the dough and moistened, only mix enough to fully incorporate the flour, and then stop. Any additional mixing can make your cookies turn out dry and tough. This little secret can give you the softest and moistest cookies on the block!

Share

Root Beer Cookies

A recipe for a cakey, root beer flavored cookie with luscious root beer icing.

Yield: 5-6 dozen

Source: A neighbor, Angela Jeo, who tells me she got it from the LDS Jordan River Temple.

I've been anxious to try this recipe since my friend Angela sent it to me over Facebook a few weeks ago. Once again, I can tell you that I have never found a cookie recipe with buttermilk in it that I didn't love, and this is no exception.

The recipe is pretty simple, but if you don't keep root beer concentrate in your pantry, you will have to plan ahead.

1 cup butter, softened

2 cups sugar

1 cup buttermilk

1 1/2 tsp. root beer concentrate

2 large eggs

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. baking soda

4 cups flour

1 1/2 cups chopped nuts

Icing:

1/2 cup butter

2 tsp. root beer concentrate

3 T. water

2-3 cups powdered sugar

Mix the ingredients together into a soft dough. Drop onto cookie sheet and bake at 400 degrees for 10-12 minutes.

Let me share a couple pieces of advice, if I may.

First, drop the dough onto a cool cookie sheet. I made the mistake of loading up a warm sheet with dough before I was ready to bake them, and met with disaster. Well, not epic disaster, just mild disaster. When the dough melts and gets a bit liquid, then it bakes into something very crunchy, and incidentally, hard to remove from the pan. Which is no fun for anyone.

Second, baking time is key here. I forgot to set my timer, and underbaked the first pan-full. They turned out kind of gooey, and not so great. I baked the second pan-full for 12 minutes, which turned out to be a bit long. They were quite brown, and crispy around the edges. Third pan-full baked for closer to 10 minutes, which was the sweet spot, if you ask me.

Third, make them small. They just turned out better when they were small.

Fourth, don't stack the cookies until they are completely cooled. Yes, I learned this one the hard way.

The frosting, (as usual) takes the cookies from good to phenomenal. The recipe I had actually called for 3/4 cup of butter, but it sounded like it would make a lot of frosting, so I reduced it to 1/2 cup. I was glad I did, because I still had plenty of frosting, even for the nearly 70 cookies this recipe made. This icing is a touch thin, and I think that's a good thing. You'll definitely want to let them sit awhile before stacking the cookies between layers of wax paper.

UPDATE: I actually didn't have enough frosting. I never frosted the dozen and a half underbaked, gooey cookies from my first pan-full. If you want to frost them all, use 3/4 cup butter and 3 cups powdered sugar in the frosting recipe.

It is unusual to bite into a cookie and taste root beer, but it's the kind of unusual I could get used to!

Share

Butterscotch Frosted Cookies

A cakey buttery cookie with a browned butter frosting. Simply delicious.

Yield: about 4-5 dozen

Source: The Cooking Cache, link below

I found this recipe at Cooking Cache, and decided it looked good enough to try. It was an unusual one, for me; not my favorite cookie, but still pretty yummy.

The recipe:

1/2 cup shortening

1 1/2 cups brown sugar

2 eggs

1 tsp. vanilla

1/2 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. baking soda

1 cup sour cream (8 oz.)

2 1/2 cups flour

2/3 cup chopped nuts

Start by creaming the shortening and brown sugar together, and then add the eggs and vanilla. Then add in the dry ingredients alternately with the sour cream. Add the nuts last. As usual, I left the nuts out. It always makes me a little sad to do this.

The dough will be quite soft, not the sort of thing you can roll into neat little balls. Drop it by teaspoonfuls onto your cookie sheet and bake at 375 degrees for 10-12 minutes. I made them kind of smallish, so 10 minutes was perfect.

They come out soft and cakey, very similar to the Chocolate Frosted cookies. The raw dough is not good, not good at all. Even the plain cookie is pretty, well... plain. So, the frosting is the key to this recipe. It is not the easiest frosting I have ever made, but it's not bad.

FROSTING:

1/2 cup butter (no substitutes)

3 1/2 - 4 cups powdered sugar

4-5 T boiling water

1 tsp. vanilla

Start by melting the butter in a saucepan over medium heat, and continue cooking until the butter is brown, but not scorched. Remove it from the heat, and stir in the other ingredients. Mine turned out pretty thin, so I put a little more powdered sugar in. And, for the sake of honesty, I will tell you that I did not actually boil the water. I just used very hot tap water. Maybe that's the lazy in me, but I think it turned out fine.

The key here is to frost the cookies as soon as you make the frosting. This frosting hardens as it sits, so time is of the essence, here. Make sure your cookies are cooled and ready to frost before you start melting the butter. Once the frosting is made, frost quickly. My frosting was starting to harden before I was quite done. If this happens, you can add a little more water and stir it up again, and that should give you a few more minutes to finish up. You can garnish them with some finely chopped nuts, if you want. Just add the nuts fast, before the frosting hardens, or they will never stick.

I think they turned out quite nicely. I won't say it was my favorite cookie of all time, but pretty good. It is perfect if you like something that is not overly sweet or chocolaty.

Share

Butter or Shortening, part 2: A Science Experiment

My daughter did this experiment for her science fair project, and I decided to steal her work and publish it on my blog. We recently had a chat about how the world is not fair, so I'm sure she will be fine with it!

First, she made a batch of chocolate chip cookies using shortening. The recipe came, I think, from the chocolate chip bag. I'll reproduce it here, just in the interest of clarity.

1 cup shortening

1 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup sugar

2 eggs

1 tsp. vanilla

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. soda

2 cups flour

1 package chocolate chips

Bake at 375 degrees for 8-10 minutes

She followed the recipe, except that we used only about half the chocolate chips called for. The shortening cookies turned out pretty much as expected, lovely and soft and delicious.

She then made a batch of cookies, substituting butter for the shortening. The first thing we realized is that the dough is much softer, and required more flour. We added about 1/2 cup extra flour. I could maybe have used even a little more. This is because butter naturally has more water in it than shortening, and hence more moisture in the dough.

The butter cookies spread a fair amount during baking, and when they came out of the oven, most of them had spread into each other, leaving us with the half-round half-square creations that have to be cut apart with the sharp end of the pancake turner. They were not pretty.

They also did not puff up as much as the shortening cookies. The lower melting point means the dough just spreads and flattens during baking. Shortening dough tends to hold its shape better.

She asked several people to taste test the cookies. She gave them one cookie from each batch, and they had to comment on the taste and the texture of each cookie. Most people liked the butter flavor better, but the texture of the shortening cookie better. As expected.

If you do make your chocolate chip cookies with butter, keep these things in mind:

First, make sure the recipe calls for butter and not shortening. Shortening recipes have more moisture in them. Baking cookies is chemistry, and getting the mixture right is crucial to a quality product. I recommend this recipe if you want butter cookies.

Second, refrigerate the dough before baking. This will not only let the flavors combine in wonderful ways, but will also prolong the melting point a little, causing less spread during baking.

Third, be sure to place dough on a cooled cookie sheet. If the sheet is hot when dough is placed on it, the dough will begin to melt even before baking, and the cookies are more prone to spreading.

Fourth, let the cookies sit for 2-5 minutes on the cookie sheet after coming out of the oven. Butter cookies have a much softer texture, and are more likely to fall apart upon removal from the cookie sheet. Give them a couple minutes to cool and set up before removing them to a cooling rack.

Share

Oreo

A super-easy and quick recipe for homemade Oreos. Customize with different frosting flavors to suit your taste.

Yield: about 4 dozen unfrosted, or 2 dozen small sandwiched cookies.

Source: as with so many of my best recipes, this one came from my Grandmother.

What a dilemma I found myself in this week. After my last post, Peanut Butter Sandwich cookies, I was left with a fair amount of peanut butter frosting in my fridge. What to do? What to do? I just couldn't bring myself to let all that sweet, peanuty loveliness go to waste. The solution? Oreos, of course!!

This is honestly the easiest cookie recipe I have ever seen. That is because it is made with a boxed cake mix. All the good stuff is already in there, and you just have to add in the wet ingredients. So here is the recipe:

1 box cake mix, any chocolate flavor

1/2 cup shortening

2 eggs

Yep, that's it. I used a Devil's food mix, which is all dark and rich and wonderful. I did have to mix a little more than usual, to get everything moistened, but that is not a problem.

I do like to make these cookies quite small, because they get sandwiched together with another cookie and lots of frosting, which is a serious overkill of calories. (Not that I'm counting!) I learned from my experience with the Peanut Butter Sandwich cookies, and rolled the dough into neat little balls. If you have one of those nice cookie dough scoops, that would certainly work nicely, but I don't, so I am reduced to using my hands.

I used a glass to smash the dough down flat, though this step is certainly not necessary. It's just a preference of mine. They stack nicer if they are flat. Is that a silly reason? Perhaps. I baked them at 350 degrees for about 9-10 minutes. By the way, let me apologize for the poor quality of the picture. All my pics turned out bad today. I didn't realize it until I was done baking, and as much as I love you all, I just wasn't willing to make another batch of cookies so I could take better photos. Sorry.

Normally, these babies get frosted with this wonderful cream cheese frosting:

8 oz. cream cheese

3 cups powdered sugar

2 T. milk

A word about quantities, here. I usually double this cookie recipe. That is, 2 cake mixes worth of cookies. Then, this frosting recipe is closer to the right amount. If you are not doubling the cookies, then you will certainly want to halve the frosting recipe. I hate to see cream cheese go to waste!

My personal choice for customizing this frosting:

First, I like to add a little mint extract and green food coloring to the cream cheese frosting for mint Oreos. I'm fond of mint, especially when coupled with chocolate, so it's a natural choice.

Second, the peanut butter frosting in this post is the best I have ever had. It is seriously delicious in the Oreos as well.

Third, is there such a thing as too much chocolate? Doubtful. Add a couple tablespoons of cocoa powder to the frosting for double chocolate Oreos. I can feel the Chocolate coma coming on!

Share