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.

After 72 hours, the dough will begin to dry out and you risk it going bad, especially if chilling pre-portioned balls of dough instead of the entire mass of dough. If you want to store longer than 72 hours, see the freezing tips below.

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.

Cool down your dough for a tastier, chewier cookie.

As little as 30 minutes in your fridge or freezer can help your cookie brown better, spread less, and develop a richer chewy texture.

Baking soda is typically used for chewy cookies, while baking powder is generally used for light and airy cookies. Since baking powder is comprised of a number of ingredients (baking soda, cream of tartar, cornstarch, etc.), using it instead of pure baking soda will affect the taste of your cookies.

Room temperature butter is just the right consistency to incorporate air when it's creamed with sugar. These trapped air pockets result in risen, fluffy cookies. If the butter is any warmer, it won't incorporate enough air and your cookies will have less rise.

Vanilla does offer more than just a bit of floral flavor. Sometimes it's a flavor enhancer and sometimes it's a flavor balancer. But to be honest, unless it's a vanilla cookie, it's not a true dealbreaker. Especially if you're making cookies that have lots of other flavors going on, like coconut or dark chocolate.

But the one technique that pops up over and over again is ripening the cookie dough — aka letting it rest in the fridge for anywhere between 30 minutes to 72 hours before baking it.

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.

Since most cookies are made with softened butter, which is then creamed with the sugar to act as the foundation, it's best to chill the dough after mixing to allow that butter to cool off. “Cookies made from chilled dough expand more slowly as they bake,” Hill says.

What does too much egg in cookie dough do? ›

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.

Flour is the main ingredient that provides structure in a cookie – without it, there would be no cookie! The gluten in flour forms a web of sorts – the framework that catches the air bubbles/gasses given off during rising.

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.

Cookies that follow a standard butter + dry ingredients + eggs formula generally benefit from ripening. These can range from classic chocolate chip cookies to chewy sugar cookies. Anytime a cookie recipe relies on eggs to provide the bulk of the liquid content, resting the dough is generally a good idea.

Texture is also improved: Long fermentation times give the enzymes present in the flour more opportunities to cleave proteins (a process known as autolysis), making it easier for them to untangle, straighten out, and link up into gluten. Gluten structure is improved.

The fact is, no matter how divine and delicious cookie dough is, it is a raw product that contains eggs and butter. Over time, it'll become rancid, on top of the lurking danger of salmonella and E. coli.

The gas and alcohol produced by the yeast and bacteria is responsible for a lot of the flavor. So the longer it gets to sit around, the better the flavor of the dough.