Burnt Cookies Are A Thing Of The Past With This Quick And Easy Solution

No judgement if your favorite kind of cookie is from Pepperidge Farm or sold by Girl Scouts (Thin Mints from the freezer — yes please), but there's something intangibly satisfying about a batch of warm, fresh, homemade cookies. Whether it's your grandma's snickerdoodles or a batch of chewy coconut chocolate chip from a food blog, homemade versions seem to build memories. Maybe it's the full sensory experience of mixing and the scent of them baking, or maybe it's sharing them; either way, baking seems to feed the soul as much as the body.

This holds true even when the worst happens, such as pulling a batch from the oven only to find they're scorched on the bottom. While no one wants to eat burned cookies, this can serve as both a learning opportunity and a lesson in ingenuity. Even as you're contemplating what went wrong, you can easily get to work salvaging the burned batch instead of simply tossing them; all you need is a box grater or microplane and a tiny bit of elbow grease. Very gently rasp the burned area of the cookie over the smallest holes on your grater, or the top of a microplane, after they've cooled and hardened a bit. This removes the bitter-tasting burned areas so you can still enjoy the fruits (or chocolate chips) of your labor. After all, the burned part is just on the outside — the inner layers are likely still delicious.

If you're concerned about your bakery-style peanut butter cookies crumbling or looking less than presentable after giving them a light sanding, there are a few ways to hide your mistake that are also pretty delicious. The first is to dip the bottoms in melted chocolate, peanut butter, or butterscotch chips and pop them in the fridge to chill. The cold sets the melted chips, giving your cookies an extra sweet touch and covering that crumbly bottom. You can also use them to make sandwich cookies with some kind of cream filling, or turn them into ice cream sandwiches.

However, the best solution to this problem is to avoid making the most common cookie baking mistakes in the first place. If your cookies frequently look dark on the bottom, you may be using too much sugar or need a new style of baking sheet. In the first case, sugar scorches when it melts, so measuring it improperly can do the same to your cookies. Be sure to level off that measuring cup, and only pack brown sugar when the recipe instructs you to. In the second case, dark or greased cookie sheets can concentrate heat underneath your cookies, causing them to burn. Instead, line light-colored insulated cookie sheets with white parchment paper or nonstick silicone mats. This helps prevent the bottoms of your cookies from overheating, ensuring they bake evenly from top to bottom.