How to Make Perfect Cookies

Baking is the joy of a lifetime for me. When I was 8 years old, I started baking eagerly. It all started with simple things like helping my mother add ingredients to the bowl and then licking the batter off the spoon! I like to look at the cookie dough through the open window, watching it expand into a nice uniform circle, and then rise as it cools out of the oven. As I grew older, I started to make my mother’s recipes by myself. Then, when I was about 12 years old, I started to explore recipes and make my signature biscuits while adjusting the recipes to my liking. Although I have always been a born baker, others have shared disaster stories with me. These people always have problems when they try to bake. I will share with you some common failures that I often hear and some tips on how to avoid them.

The biscuits look flat, thin and liquid:

I don’t know how many times I’ve been to someone’s house, church or party. They serve thin biscuits, and the batter looks like it’s cooked in layers of liquid. This is because you overmix your cookie dough. For best results, please read the following tips.

1. Stir the batter until combined. After you cannot determine your ingredients individually, do not mix them further.
2. If the recipe calls for adding a small amount of flour mixture when mixing, then do so. Flour is your rising agent. Therefore, you do not want to over-mix this ingredient.
3. Recipes usually say that the flour mixture should be mixed with the other ingredients at the end. Make sure you follow these instructions exactly. There is a reason for this.

Cookie dough has a strange consistency:

Cookie dough should not be runny. In fact, it should be strong and granular. If the dough is thin or smooth, there may be several reasons.

1. Check the ingredients carefully. You may have forgotten the binder (usually eggs) or thickeners (flour, baking powder).
2. Check your measurement value; your measurement value may be incorrect.
3. Make sure that you are not replacing any ingredient with another ingredient that has a different purpose or response than the originally expected ingredient. I know it’s tempting to use alternative ingredients when you forget something in the store or don’t have enough ingredients, but it might ruin your entire recipe. (The most common substitute ingredient in baking is to use Crisco or margarine instead of butter. Some recipes say this is okay, but I won’t change it unless specifically stated.)

Cookies burned below:

This is caused by too much greasy cookie dough. The cookie dough is oily enough.

1. Make sure again that you have not replaced any ingredient with another ingredient that has a different purpose or reaction than the originally expected ingredient. Replacing butter with Crisco usually causes the biscuits to be too greasy and therefore easy to burn in the oven.
2. Do not grease/spray non-stick coating on the bakeware. The cookie dough is naturally greasy and will not stick to the baking sheet unless you let it cool completely on the baking sheet. If you spray or oil the baking tray, you will surely burn the bottom of the perfect biscuit.

Biscuits don’t taste as they should be.

This is caused by changing the seasoning ingredients. Flavouring agents can be extracts, spices, potato chips, nuts, candies or fruits, which are added to the dough to give it a special taste.

1. Forget the seasoning
2. Change the seasoning
3. The amount of seasoning is incorrect

Although changing these seasonings will cause the biscuits to taste different, this is not always a bad thing. Some recipes require more flavour than you want. (For example, I always omit or reduce the amount of nutmeg required in the recipe because I think its flavour is too strong. This is my personal preference. ) The taste of other recipes may not be as sweet as you want. (I recommend adding white chocolate chips.) A more subtle change in taste is to change the extract. There are several extract flavours to choose from; they will slightly change the flavour without being too obvious because the flavour is not very strong. Although changing these ingredients can make the biscuits taste different, it is not always a bad thing. I often adjust these flavour ingredients to obtain cookies specifically tailored to my taste buds.

I still like to bake today. Baking biscuits have always been my pleasure because they are focused enough to share with family, friends and colleagues. You need to bake the perfect biscuits according to the instructions on the “T”. Don’t mix too much, don’t change the ingredients for different purposes, don’t add fats and adjust the seasoning ingredients according to your preferences. Remember, baking is both an art and a science.