If your baking soda or baking powder is expired, your cookies won't develop as they are supposed to – causing them not to rise but simply to spread across your oven tray. It's a good idea to regularly replace your raising agents as they are key to baked goods rising as they should when baked.
That, or the dough wasn't cool enough before baking. Warm cookie dough or excess butter will cause the cookies to spread too much, baking quickly on the outside but remaining raw in the middle. Next time, chill your cookies in the fridge for 10 minutes before you bake them. If the problem persists, use less butter.
One common trick to hardening soft cookies is to simply stick them back in the oven for a little bit longer. You will want to keep a close eye on them to make sure that they only harden and that they do not begin to overbake and burn. What is this?
Why Did My Cookies Come Out Cakey? When cookies are too cakey, there are two main culprits: too much leavening (baking powder or baking soda) or too much egg. If there is too much baking powder or baking soda in the dough, the cookies will rise too much when baking, creating a cakier structure.
Q: Why are my cookies so puffy and cakey? Whipping too much air into the dough. That fluffy texture you want in a cake results from beating a lot of air into the room temperature butter and sugar, and it does the same for cookies. So don't overdo it when you're creaming together the butter and sugar.
One of the most common reasons why cookies didn't spread out in the oven is because you added too much flour. Cookies rely on the perfect ratio of butter to flour in order to spread just the right amount when baked. It's very easy to over measure flour when using cup measurements.
7. You overwork the dough. If you mix (or roll out) cookie dough too much, you'll add excess air to the dough, causing it to rise and then fall flat in the oven. Overmixing the dough can also lead to excess gluten development, resulting in dense cookies.
Your oven is too hot.
The hotter your oven is, the more quickly the fat in your cookies (like butter) starts to melt. Baking them at a lower temperature for a few minutes longer can help them stay thick and chewy.
Some cookies are meant to be cakey, like the delicious cake mix cookies. But others, like your traditional chocolate chip cookie, isn't meant to be cakey. Cakey cookies can be caused by dough that has too much flour, is overbeaten, has too much baking powder, or has too many eggs.
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. It doesn't take much—in this case, my mom and I added just 3/4 cup extra flour to the dough.
If the edges burn and the center is undone, it means the heat didn't have enough time to reach the relatively cool center before the edge was too hot. The temperature gradient depends on the amount of heat from your oven and the size of your cookie - and to some degree on the thermal properties of your cookie sheet.
Cookie temperatures fluctuate, with some recipes as low as 300 degrees Fahrenheit, and a few as high as 425 degrees Fahrenheit, but most recipes land on 375 or 350 to evenly bake the entirety of the cookie.
Light colored cookies with dark speckles typically indicates that the cookies are underbaked. You can stick the stone back in the oven for another few minutes and they should finish baking.
If your cookies have cooled all the way down and they're still more on the raw side, they'll have to go back in the oven. As per Food52's instructions, preheat your oven to about 300 or 325 degrees Fahrenheit, then add the cookies in for 10 to 15 minutes at most, depending on how underbaked they were to begin with.
When making cookies, brownies, cakes, or bread, you might be tempted to taste a bite before it's fully baked. But you can get sick after eating or tasting raw (unbaked) dough or batter.
And there are no baking police: If your recipe tells you to flatten your cookies before baking, you just go ahead and do that however you want. So long as they end up evenly flat, that is; squashing cookies haphazardly under your palm means they may bake and brown unevenly.
The most common reason that cookies are tough is that the cookie dough was mixed too much. When flour is mixed into the dough, gluten begins to form. Gluten helps hold baked goods together, but too much gluten can lead to tough cookies.
If you find that you have over-mixed the cookie dough and it is getting dry, there is a simple fix. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let it sit at room temperature for at least an hour. Scoop the dough directly onto a baking sheet without mixing again and place it in the oven to bake.
Add Molasses or Honey Another way to add more moisture to your cookies is incorporate a tablespoon of molasses into a standard-sized cookie recipe. Don't use any more than a tablespoon, because it will make your cookies very sweet and runny. One tablespoon is just enough.
Baking cookies quickly in a hot oven – at 375 degrees F as opposed to a lower temperature – will make for soft results. They'll bake fast instead of sitting and drying out in the oven's hot air. Ever so slightly underbaking your cookies will give you softer results than cooking them the full amount the recipe says.
Q: HOW LONG SHOULD I CHILL THE DOUGH? Anywhere from 24 to 72 hours. The longer you chill the dough, the more flavor will develop. The flour will also absorb more of the moisture so the thicker and chewier the final texture will be.
As Nicole Weston of Baking Bites advises, "Do the minimum amount of mixing necessary to make a uniform dough." When no streaks of flour remain in the mixing bowl (be sure to scrape down the sides), stop mixing.
The short answer is: Yes. Resting your dough in the refrigerator will almost always yield better results. But why? Chilling your cookie dough in the refrigerator after mixing it allows the flour to hydrate and gives the other ingredients time to blend, resulting in a richer, more well-rounded flavor profile.
As a general rule of thumb, you should refrigerate cookie dough for at least 30 minutes and up to 24 hours. More than that, and you won't see a noticeable difference in the final product. Once the dough has chilled, let it warm up at room temperature until it's just pliable (about 5 to 10 minutes).
Sugar sucks up liquid, and when those cookies bake, it'll release the liquid and cause the cookies to spread out. If you use too much butter, the cookies will end up flat and greasy.