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16 Common Baking Mistakes That Are Ruining Your Cookies

The American love of cookies is storied, but it is hardly unique. Cookies are found across the world, from the French madeleine to the Arabic filled cookie, maamoul, and butter cookies in Japan. They are a food of truly international flavor and expansiveness. The number of colloquial phrases involving cookies is further testament to their cultural relevance: "That's the way the cookie crumbles;" "She's a smart cookie;" or, my favorite, "C is for cookie, that's good enough for me" ... one of Cookie Monster's better bits.

There's a downside, though. While cookies are a fan favorite in most any house, they can be surprisingly hard to get right given the simplicity of their ingredients. "Cookie baking definitely has its quirks," confirms Pinch and Swirl recipe developer Marissa Stevens, "but I've found that with just a little attention to detail, you can avoid the most common pitfalls and get consistently great results."

So what are those pitfalls? Often, they have to do with ingredients; other times, it has to do with the ways those ingredients interact both with one another and the heat of the oven. "I find the chemistry of cookies fascinating," says author Jessie-Sierra Ross of Straight to the Hips, Baby. "All of these simple ingredients come together to make something really special." If you get those factors right — chemistry, ingredients — then you too can make something special in your own kitchen. Accordingly, here are 16 mistakes to stop making today.

Buying the wrong flour

There are many types of flour: all-purpose, cake, pastry, bread, self-rising, whole wheat ... the list goes on. Due to this variety, one of the most common cookie-baking mistakes is treating flours as interchangeable. Yes, you should make sure you have quality all-purpose flour on hand, as it's commonly called for in cookie recipes — but don't assume it's the only one your recipe might indicate, and don't think you can sub in others willy-nilly.

"All-purpose, whole wheat, and alternative flours like almond or coconut flour behave very differently in recipes," Marissa Stevens explains. "Each has unique properties that affect structure, moisture, and flavor." Make sure you're choosing the one — or the mix — for which your recipe specifically calls. If you're going to make substitutions, she says, start small. Look up a recipe that uses that flour and follow it. And, as she often explains to frustrated readers in her blog's comments, never make 1:1 swaps without checking.

Forgetting to check expiration dates

Another common mistake? Failing to check the expiration dates on your ingredients. For some, this matters less. Sugars, for instance, are essentially ageless, because they resist microbial development. As long as you store them properly in airtight containers they'll serve you well forever. Salt is another ingredient that will withstand the test of time indefinitely.

Other ingredients aren't so forgiving. Flour, for one, can go rancid, especially alternative flours that have a higher fat content. Leaveners are also problematic. "Remember to check the expiration dates on your baking soda or baking powder," Jessie-Sierra Ross cautions. "If your rising agent is over the expiration date or close to it, throw it away. Expired leavening won't properly bake up and can lead to very flat cookies."

Using cold ingredients

Some folks (ahem, those of us who like to bake up cookies on a five-second whim) have tried and tried again to use butter, eggs, and milk from the fridge — with uniformly crummy results. "If you're using cold butter, it simply won't mix into your other ingredients," explains Meredith Kruse, founder of Our Love Language Is Food. "Using room temperature butter allows you to cream it into your sugars, and incorporate it with the rest of your ingredients to make your dough."

Eggs matter, too. "Cold eggs can cause the mixture to curdle," Marissa Stevens explains. "They cause the softened butter to firm up again, causing the mixture to separate." If you're in a hurry, you can submerge them in a bowl of warm water for five to 10 minutes to kill the chill. On the counter, Kruse adds, you should wait for at least 30 minutes.

There are exceptions to the room temperature rule. For instance, some bakers prefer melted butter and cooled over room temp, because it leads to the chewiest chocolate chip cookie results. Note that if you bake a lot and want to keep butter at room temp all the time, you might consider a French butter crock, which has the added bonus of looking très mignon on your countertop.

Measuring flour wrong

Many people (yours truly included) learned to scoop flour straight out of the bag with a measuring cup, but this is not a good approach. "If the flour is compacted in the measuring cup, you can accidentally portion out more than you need," Jessie-Sierra Ross explains. "You want to make sure your flour is fluffed with a spoon to add a bit of air before using a measuring cup."

Ideally, you still don't want to scoop straight from the bag, Marissa Stevens explains, as this can compact the flour down to its previous size — potentially adding up to 25% more than you need, she says. This can make cookies dry or dense. Don't believe her? "Testing side by side with proper measuring techniques (more on that below) really shows the difference. It's worth trying yourself!" Instead, fill the cup with gentle spoonfuls and then level it off. Even better, measure with a digital scale.

Eyeballing your ingredients

Because baking is a process that relies heavily on chemistry, and chemistry is an extremely fussy mistress, you really can't be eyeballing things. You have to measure carefully. "If we skip the digital kitchen scale (when measuring by weight) or the traditional measuring cups (when measuring by level), you can end up with an uneven product that doesn't meet your expectations," Jessie-Sierra Ross explains. "It's important to measure your ingredients as precisely as possible to ensure that your shortbread cookies end up flaky and your snickerdoodles rise properly."

In some cases, it's not as important to measure your ingredients perfectly, as when they don't affect the final outcome of your recipe (for instance, if you're rolling them in sugar or a salty-sweet mixture before baking). When specific amounts are called for, however, pay attention.

Opting not to sift your dry ingredients

Sifting helps to remove lumps and clumps from your dry ingredients. Not only are these gross when you bite into them, but clumps mean your liquid won't distribute evenly, leading to a lumpy final result. Moreover, sifting helps ensure your dry ingredients are mixed together thoroughly.

According to Jessie-Sierra Ross, sifting does come down to preference somewhat. If you really don't want to, you don't have to; it's not important the way it is for airy goods, such as cakes. Marissa Stevens says, though, that it's probably worth it for ingredients that tend to clump. Think cocoa powder, powdered sugar, salt, or baking powder. "Those clumps can create uneven pockets in your dough and mess with the texture," she says. "If you don't have a sifter, a wire mesh strainer works just as well."

Messing with the recipe

It's true that many recipes enjoy an update, such as chocolate chip cookies at the holidays. Peanut butter cookie recipes can also be forgiving, if you know what you're doing. Other updates — think browning your butter, playing with extracts, or swapping in different kinds of flour — can all make your cookies more exciting as well.

The downside is, if you do it wrong, you can ruin your batch. Using different numbers of eggs, subbing baking soda for baking powder incorrectly (or vice versa), reducing the amount of sugar, or mixing wet and dry together at the same time ... these are all tweaks that can drastically change the final result. "Changing base ingredients like flour, sugar, or leaveners affects the chemistry of your cookies," Marissa Stevens says. "These ingredients determine how cookies spread, rise, brown, and hold together; they're not just about taste."

"More advanced bakers will have a better feel for what substitutions may work in a recipe," Meredith Kruse says. If you're still learning, it's probably best to go by the book. "A well-tested recipe will outline specific ingredients and ingredient ratios for a reason."

Overworking the dough

Wheat flour contains the proteins gliadin and glutenin. When you knead dough, you mix these together to form gluten, the structural compound that leads to the chewy bite of, say, good French bread or pasta. The more you mix them together, the more you develop gluten, leading to a tough result that is not ideal for cookies. There are other downsides, too.

"In cookie doughs, overmixing generally means that we're adding too much air to the dough, which can result in flat and dense cookies after baking," Jessie-Sierra Ross says. "You want to mix a cookie dough until it becomes just uniform (no flour pockets) to avoid adding too much air into the dough." To avoid this, Marissa Stevens advises mixing until both the dry and wet ingredients are fully combined.

Skipping the chill

"If a recipe asks you to chill your cookie dough, yes, it really does make a difference!" Meredith Kruse says. "Depending on the type of cookie you're making, there may be different reasons to do so, but one of the main reasons for chilling is to reduce spreading while baking, resulting in flat cookies."

That's not all, though. Chilling the dough also makes it easier to work with, per Kruse. "For example, if you're making a crinkle cookie that needs to be rolled into a ball and dipped into sugar, chilling the dough helps it become less sticky so you can actually roll it into dough balls with a nice shape," she says. Plus, it reduces their stickiness so you don't come away with more dough on your hands than on the cookie sheet. Pro tip: using a dedicated cookie scooper can help you make balls of the right size — especially if you get a three-scoop set for flexibility — without getting your hands messy.

Chilling the dough allows the fat to get cold, which creates a crispy outside and chewy inside. Also, chilling gives dry ingredients time to absorb wet ones, which minimizes unwanted spread as well. On a final note, Marissa Stevens says, "That time in the refrigerator allows flavors to develop, especially for cookies like chocolate chip."

Preparing the cookie sheet improperly

A cookie sheet is a cookie sheet, right? You just grease it and go? That's what this novice baker was taught (but then, this baker has been baking for 35 years and is still a novice, so that should tell you something). Instead of giving your cookie sheet a coat of PAM and calling it good, Marissa Stevens has a tip that shouldn't be overlooked: parchment paper and silicone baking mats. "They prevent sticking and help cookies brown evenly. Once you try them, you'll never go back to greasing your cookie sheets!"

Note also that if you use too dark a baking sheet, you could burn the bottom of your cookies. Dark pans absorb and then distribute more heat than lighter pans, which is good for a pizza but less so for cookies when you don't want a dark bottom.

Crowding the cookie sheet

One of the easiest errors to commit when baking cookies is crowding the cookie sheet. "Crowding cookies on the sheet is tempting, but it's a recipe for disaster," Marissa Stevens says. "Cookies need room to spread, and proper air circulation means even baking." More specifically, Meredith Kruse says it's important to be mindful of spacing for the shape of your cookies, too. Baking them too close together can result in them sticking together or losing their intended shape.

This is another area in which science has a big role to play, according to Jessie-Sierra Ross. "We often forget that just like flour, sugar, and butter, heat is a very important ingredient in baking," she says. "Having uniform and consistent baking temperatures will avoid burnt edges or worse, raw cookie dough centers." Those burnt edges and raw centers can result in very unappealing, uneven cookies, the result of uneven heating.

Setting the wrong oven temp

We all have the temptation to set the oven to 350 F and go. Isn't that what cookies always bake at, after all? Well, no, and if you don't set the right temperature, you can profoundly alter the final results. That's because oven temperature is specifically related to the recipe's ingredients, and more specifically, to the chemical reactions between them. The amount of heat matters to getting those reactions right. Set the wrong temp, and your baked goods can rise too fast, fail to rise, collapse, and so on.

Always make sure your oven is at the right temperature, no matter what. Even if you're taking something else out of the oven, resist the urge to put your cookies right in rather than wait for the heat to adjust. Similarly, if a recipe calls for you to start with a higher temperature and then lower it, make sure to mind those specific instructions.

Putting the cookies in while preheating

"Starting with a properly heated oven is crucial for even baking," Marissa Stevens says. "Those first few minutes of baking are when cookies develop their structure. The right temperature from the start is non-negotiable." Seriously, she warns, you can ruin your cookies by putting them into a preheating oven. This will cause some to finish baking — and begin to overbake — before others even set. Moreover, Jessie-Sierra Ross adds, "If you try to bake your cookies starting from a cold oven, the outside of the cookies will finish well before the center of the cookie, leading to burnt edges and flat raw centers."

Preheating is necessary to make sure the oven is not only hot enough, but the temperature is consistent, as the preheating process often uses blasting heat to bring the oven up to the right temperature. Wait 10-15 minutes (or at least for the beep) and you should be fine. Otherwise, you can trigger the start of chemical processes in your cookie that the current heat cannot accommodate and wind up with wonky results.

Opening the oven door

Just as the correct temperature matters, keeping that temp consistent matters, too. "I know it's tempting to peek, but opening the oven door lets out heat and creates big temperature swings," Marissa Stevens says. Not only does it drop the temperature, but the oven then kicks back on to compensate, which can really mess with your cookies. "Especially if you keep peeking inside, the final texture and consistency of your cookies may not be as expected," Meredith Kruse adds.

Jessie-Sierra Ross recommends you wait until two to three minutes before the cookies are supposed to be done before you open the door. "If you need to check doneness, use your oven light," Stevens advises. "It's a great way to see how they're coming along without messing with the bake."

Overbaking the cookies

Most of us are shooting for cookies that are soft and tender in the middle, rather than finished products that are completely set and crunchy all the way through. True, some recipes (such as shortbread) call for a completely set middle, but many do not. The good news is that cookies with a perfectly gooey middle are not as hard as you think; you just need to take them out sooner than you think.

Cookies often don't look done when the timer beeps, but waiting until they're dark in the oven often means they come out dry and overdone. "The biggest reason for overbaking is forgetting that cookies continue to bake on the hot sheet after you take them out," Marissa Stevens says, adding that you can't change this basic fact even by hurriedly transferring them to a cooling rack, where they may just fall apart because they're too delicate right out of the oven. Your best bet is to pull them out when they still look slightly underdone. "They'll set as they cool," she explains.

Another problem? If you blindly trust a recipe you haven't used before. Due to the natural variations in oven temperatures, elevation, and so on, your oven won't bake the same as the blogger's whose recipe you're following. "To avoid tough, overbaked cookies, I like to check on my cookies about two or three minutes before the recommended baking time," Jessie-Sierra Ross says. That can account for differences. If you're the forgetful type, she recommends using a kitchen timer rather than keeping track in your head.

Storing improperly

Like any other baked good that contains dairy, eggs, and flour, cookies will eventually go bad, a process that is expedited by improper storage. When you allow air access to cookies, it sucks out the moisture, drying them out. It also causes the starches in the cookie to go stale.

Ideally, choose a container to keep them in that provides protection against the air, and store them at room temp, which keeps them the freshest. "I like to use large cookie tins lined with wax or parchment paper, to keep my cookies fresh for days," Jessie-Sierra Ross says. Airtight food storage containers work well for this too, if you don't care as much about cuteness. Your typical cookie jar, with an ill-fitting crockery lid, probably isn't the best, however.

If you can't eat your cookies within four days, stick them in the freezer. Make sure to use a freezer-save container or bag, and they will stay good for up to a year.

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