The Best Cookie Baking Tip You'll Get This Season
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, or as it’s known in my house, Cookie Season.
Growing up, my family always had a Cookie Day. A day when all hands were on deck and cookies were made. Lots of cookies. Never a group to be satisfied with one or two kinds, we went all out. We made pans of fudge, mounds of divinity, and slabs of toffee. We dressed Gingerbread people and animals in royal icing clothing and toasted huge tubs of Chex Mix. Pretzel logs were dipped in chocolate and covered with sprinkles, and Spritz cookies were pressed and dusted with red and green sugar. There were always frosted and decorated sugar cookies. They are still my dad’s favorite, but he only likes the tree-shaped ones.
I like making sugar cookies all year long. I love all of the different shapes - not just the trees - something for every season. I enjoy the frosting process, and I like decorating them with colored sprinkles.
However, I’m not always a patient baker and the additional step of refrigerating the sugar cookie dough annoys me. It’s not the actual refrigerating that I dislike, because I understand how important it is to baking delicious cookies.
The part I don’t like is putting a ball of soft workable dough into the fridge, only to take it out an hour later, then waiting another 30 minutes for it to warm up to the point of being workable before it rapidly becomes too soft to work with.
Why you need to chill your cookie dough for at least 30 minutes
Chilling your dough helps keep your cookies from spreading
Chilling your dough solidifies the butter in the cookies, so even in the oven, it takes longer for the butter to melt than at room temperature. The longer the butter takes to melt, the less your cookies will spread, so your gingerbread people stay looking like people, not puffy blobs.
Chilling your cookie dough improves the flavor and texture of your cookies
As your cookie dough chills in the fridge, it dries out. It absorbs the liquid ingredients, concentrates the flavors, and leaves your dough with a higher percentage of sugar than before. Sugar is a flavor enhancer, so your cookies will be a bit sweeter after a few minutes in the fridge and will have a crispy, chewy texture instead of a soft, doughy one.
So basically, I want all of the good things that chilling does for my dough, without having to let the dough warm up to be usable.
I found the solution in this terrific suggestion by Dorie Greenspan. Her recipes include the very clever recommendation of dividing the dough as soon as you’ve mixed it up, then rolling each chuck of dough between two pieces of parchment paper before chilling them by stacking them in the fridge. After chilling, peel off the top sheet of paper, cut out your cookies, and bake them right away.
You get all of the ease of working with soft dough and all of the benefits of chilled dough, without the hassle of fresh-from-the-fridge difficult-to-work dough.
What’s more, you can pull each already-rolled-out sheet of dough out of the fridge as you are ready to use it, so it doesn’t have time to warm up and get gooey sitting on the counter.
It’s perfect.
In honor of the tip that has changed my cookie-baking life, this week’s recipe is Dorie’s awesome Do-Almost-Anything Vanilla Cookie Dough recipe from her newsletter, xoxo Dorie and her great cookie cookbook, Dorie’s Cookies. It’s my go-to recipe for all kinds of sugar cookies. The dough is fabulous to work with, the cookies keep their shape beautifully, and they are delicious!
It’s everything I want in a sugar cookie. I hope you will try them.
Happy Cookie Baking!
Chelly
