Chocolate Sugar Cookies - The Recipe Critic (2024)

FAQs

What causes sugar cookies to crack? ›

Issues with cracking usually derive from the sugar coating, not enough or expired baking powder or baking soda, or the oven temperature isn't hot enough. Solution: Granulated sugar is more effective at drying the surface than powdered sugar.

Too much sugar and butter can make sugar cookies spread and lose their shape when baked. This one requires a little patience because once you roll out your dough, you are ready to bake. Be patient and bake your cookies when the dough is really cold.

Take plain sugar cookies up a notch with exciting mix-ins like chocolate chips, rainbow sprinkles, toasted chopped nuts, chopped dried fruit or M&M's. Add these after blending your butter and egg into the sugar cookie mix.

Is there anything worse than biting into a beautiful sugar cookie only have it be hard and crumbly? Let's avoid that at all costs! Start by making sure you do not over-mix your cookie dough. The less you work the gluten the more tender your cookie will be. Another factor can be the amount of flour used.

The holes trick

There's also a new technique going around when preventing craters in a second layer of icing: poke holes in the base flood (under the area you'll cover with a second layer of icing). You can even do this when the first layer flood has completely dried!

To fix this, you can add more fat to the dough. This can be in the form of butter, shortening, or even olive oil. Just add a little at a time until the dough comes together and is no longer crumbly. You may also need to add more liquid, such as milk or water, to get the right consistency.

The primary reason for a brief resting period to redistribute the liquid in the dough. While the dough sits, turning from loose and soft to drier and more scoopable, the flour is hydrating, yielding cookies that will bake and brown more evenly.

1) Don't grease your baking pan — line it instead

“For the best results, choose a silicone baking mat or parchment paper to line your pan,” Dawn recommends. “Simply greasing your pan — basically adding fat to it — will encourage your cookies to spread.” (Check out our side-by-side test baking to see for yourself.)

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.

Working the dough too much.

And then mixing the dough even more, for no good reason. Thankfully I was eventually steered in the right direction. Over-working the dough yields a tough cookie, which is not at all what you want. The very best sugar cookies are soft and tender.

What's Taylor Swift's favorite cookie? ›

Taylor originally baked her chai sugar cookies for her 1989 secret sessions back in 2014, eventually sharing the recipe on her Tumblr when fans asked for it. With the recent re-release of 1989 (Taylor's Version), it feels like the perfect time to bring this cookie recipe back out from the vault.

Step Two: Add the egg, vanilla extract, and almond extract.

The combination of vanilla and almond is actually a little trick a bunch of bakeries use in their vanilla flavored baked goods! A vanilla and almond combo creates a more complex flavor profile that'll take your sugar cookies from homemade to bakery style.

Chilling the dough also improves the way your cookies taste. "In terms of flavor, you'll notice more depth of flavor from the vanilla and the sugar will taste sweeter," says Haught Brown. "In terms of texture, chilled cookie dough produces a more evenly golden-brown cookie with a crisper edge and chewier center."

Cornstarch Is The Secret To Soft And Chewy Cookies.

Popping your dough in the fridge allows the fats to cool. As a result, the cookies will expand more slowly, holding onto their texture. If you skip the chilling step, you're more likely to wind up with flat, sad disks instead of lovely, chewy cookies. Cookies made from chilled dough are also much more flavorful.

Layering will keep your cookies fresh and safe from cracking. To do this, cut a sheet of parchment paper to the size of your cookie container and place a piece of parchment between each layer until your container is full.

It holds its shape, and one major trick is that after you make your dough, you'll roll it out, cut out your cookie shapes, and then put them on a lined baking sheet and only then PUT THEM IN THE FREEZER for 10 minutes, then straight into the oven after. No cooling and then rolling. You roll, cut, and then cool!

Roll it too thin, and the dough will be really fragile and may easily tear or break. Roll it too thick, and you run the risk of the cookies not baking evenly or cooking all the way through. → Follow this tip: For super soft, tender sugar cookies, roll the dough to 1/4-inch thick.