The right way: Make sure your baking powder is no older than six months, and replace it if it is. Yes, this is really a thing. Dark colors absorb more heat than light ones, and the difference is significant enough to affect the cooking times for cookies.
Unfortunately, most recipes don't specify a color of cookie sheet. But if your cookies are burning and you're using a dark cookie sheet, that's likely the culprit. The right way: Use light-colored cookie sheets or reduce oven temperature by 25 degrees. Cookies are supposed to spread when you bake them, as the butter and sugar melt. But sometimes they can spread so much that they practically merge into one giant cookie.
This can happen for a lot of reasons , but assuming you followed the recipe in every other way, the most likely cause is greasing the cookie sheet too much, or in some cases, at all. The right way: Skip greasing and line your pan with parchment paper instead. Your cookies won't stick, but they won't spread excessively, either.
Of course you know you're supposed to do this. It's the first instruction in any recipe. And it's not like you're skipping it intentionally. Like many mistakes, it's mostly a matter of forgetting to do it.
And this is especially important with cookies because they might only bake for 10 or 12 minutes, so your oven really needs to be at the right temperature when they go in.
The right way: Get in the habit of doing everything the recipe says, including preheating the oven. You need to open the oven door to take the cookies out, obviously, but you don't want to be doing it every couple of minutes. Every time you do that, all the heat escapes and the oven temperature drops. This is not as bad for cookies as it is for cakes, but it's still bad. It can, for instance, prevent your cookies from spreading, or from browning.
Cookies and bars can become too tender to remove from the pan if you use too little flour or too much sugar. Use the exact type of fat butter, oil, or shortening called for in the recipe.
Don't substitute shortening for butter or butter for shortening. It changes the consistency of the cookie or bar and yields unpredictable results. You can substitute high-fat at least calories per tablespoon stick margarine for butter, but never use low-fat margarine, as they can make cookies and bars flat and harder to remove from the pan.
Unless specified, use large eggs for baking so your cookies and bars keep their structure. Greasing bottom of pan. Credit: Jason Donnelly. Apply a little bit of shortening to a paper towel or piece of waxed paper. You can also use a pastry brush to spread softened shortening. Spread the shortening in a thin coating over the bottom and sides of the pan. Coat the crevices where the sides meet the bottom of the pan. Lining a pan with foil. Credit: Scott Little. Thank you so much!
And beat, making it as smooth as possible, add eggs, mix again, add flour and any flavoring that you use ie; vanilla, etc. Mix again, only then add the rest of the room temp soft butter.
Final mix. It is also possible that , in your original recipe, you were not mixing enough. You are using a stand mixer?
I seem to recall, many, many years ago trying to make choc chip cookies at a friends house. All my friend had was a mixing bowl and a heavy wooden spoon. Those cookies fell apart after baking. My arm got too tired and I figured it was fine.
Later, at my house I made the same recipe but I used my stand mixer. Result, perfect cookies. Though the culprit is usually a flour deficit, butter could also be to blame for this problem. Adding too soft or slightly melted butter to the dough can also result in flat cookies.
Many bakers — my mom and myself included — heat the butter to soften it. Warming the butter too long can cause it to start melting, so if you notice a little puddle around your sticks of butter, it's best to wait for it to cool off a bit. Scooping dough onto a warm pan can also cause the cookies to spread more; so for the second batch and beyond, my mom and I usually stick the dough in the fridge until it's time to load up the next cookie sheet.
The easy fix here is to add more flour to the dough, little by little, until it sticks well to the mixer. If your cookies come out looking more like biscuits, you've likely added too much flour. Our cookies didn't expand much from the rolled-up balls we put on the baking sheet.
They also didn't brown as well as the other cookies. The cookies tasted good but were dry and definitely crumbly. If your cookies come out flat on top, with a cake-like texture, you've added too many eggs. In this case, my mom and I added two extra eggs. Adding extra eggs is not a common issue, but we were curious. The results looked presentable, though the chocolate chips were lost a bit in the dough.
Biting into the cookie, however, we could tell a big difference. They were gummy and lost much of their sweetness. Saving cookies from too many eggs isn't as straightforward as saving it from too much or too little flour. It takes a little finagling. Add some flour and maybe a little bit more sugar. What my mom and I ended up doing was going with the egg-induced texture to create something entirely different — we added more flour, more sugar, chopped nuts and baked in a greased 9x12 pan.
I wouldn't dare presume to define the perfect cookie. It's different for every person. I personally like them the way my mom makes them, chewy in the middle and crispy on the edges, a little flat but not brittle. They hold up well when sealed in an airtight container and freeze beautifully. These are made by following the recipe above, only the butter is perhaps a little softer than called for.
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