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If the cookies you made do not look like the picture that you saw online it might not be the recipe. It's probably one of the five common technique mistakes that I'm going to share with you. After 20 plus years of working as a professional pastry chef in the industry I know how to fix them. I'm going to use my homemade chips ahoy recipe as an example for a standard classic chocolate chip cookie. Here's mistake number one. Mistake number one butter temperature. Now I know it's the first ingredient but doing this incorrectly can give you vastly different results. What some people do is they melt their butter or they soften it too much it ends up melted like this. If you start out
with melted butter your cookie will get excessive spreading. Sometimes people like that some people don't and sometimes it looks like it has melted on the tray. We definitely don't want that. Mixing your dough up with melted butter is not giving you the structure that you want from a room temperature butter. It's totally the opposite. So think melted butter going into your cookie will give you a melted cookie. Now the total opposite of that is cold butter. Butter straight from the fridge. What happens with this is that it doesn't combine into your dough correctly and you'll end up with uneven mixing and lumps of butter. It is not the result you want because when it bakes your dough
is not combined and you will get patches of melted butter throughout your cookie. It might sound delicious and I'm sure it does taste delicious but it's not the result that you're looking for. It doesn't give you that iconic chocolate chip cookie look. For best results you guessed it. It is somewhere in between these two room temperature softened butter. What softened butter looks like is this. Softened butter blends beautifully with the rest of your cookie dough ingredients. It has structure, it has integrity and it will give you the perfect spread on your cookie. It spreads a little bit but not too much. Keeping a nice thicker cookie and then you'll get that kind of chewy thickness in the middle. Okay so
let's look at our cookie dough's melted butter dough. Brittle crumbly didn't really come together. This is what's supposed to give you the most kind of excessive spread which is not what we want. Let's wait and see what that result is like. Now look at this. I know it looks a bit extreme but this is really what happens when your temperature is not right of your butter. You get dry crumbly mix and like how are we supposed to turn that into a cookie? We're going to find out in a few minutes and then here we have softened room temperature butter. Our dough came together, it's pliable, it's ready to be scooped right now even without chilling. Okay so now for the moment of truth let's see how
each of these three cookies all baked and here are our results. Melted butter, excess spreading and a thinner cookie. Thinner cookie means that it cooked faster and cooked firmer which is not what we want from this cookie and as you can clearly see around the edges the cookie literally melted. Okay let's look at this one. Dry crumbly dough where the butter was coals, uneven mixing and a patchy texture. The cookies are much smaller, they're lumpier because of the uneven texture and they look nothing like what they're supposed to look like. Number three butter, creamed, softened at room temperature, really well whipped, gives you a consistent look, a nice thickness to your cookie and controlled spreading. This is what we're
going for. However butter temperature and texture is not the only thing that's affecting your cookies in a negative way. Mistake number two over mixing. Now this actually applies to all of your baking and it's not at the stage for your cookies when you're combining the sugar and the butter. You can actually do that for a little bit of time. If you go too far it will get greasy so it's not referring to the butter and the sugar. We're creaming that together, it gets nice and light and fluffy. Where the goal for mixing goes wrong is when you're adding in your flour. Once your flour goes in there and starts to mix, the longer it is mixing on the machine or by hand, gluten is developing. Gluten is what we want when we're making bread. We knead it on the machine,
we beat it up, we put it on for an extended time and we develop gluten strands and those beautiful gluten strands develop bubbly fluffy bread. We do not want that in our cookies. You don't want it in your cakes either. What you want to do when you're adding in flour into your recipes like cookies or like cakes, just add it in until it's just combined. Add in your remaining ingredients if you have them. So when it comes to adding your flour add it in mix until just combined. Sometimes I even write that in a big capital just like this. Some streaks are okay. We're going to add in our chocolate chips and we're going to stop when the dough comes together. That is it.
Developing gluten in cookies gives you a tough cookie. What you want is a cookie with a soft crumb that just melts in your mouth. So mix your dough until it comes together just like this. If you get distracted, walk off, start scrolling on YouTube and you forget about your machine, then it will beat and beat. The flour will start to toughen, get stronger and give you a cookie that you're not going to want to eat. Now I know I went extreme with this but it has to be done. You can't tell a huge difference between the doughs right now. The proof is going to be when we bake it off but the one thing that over mixing a cookie dough does also and I want you to see this. Do you see the color? Over mixing breaks down the chocolate so all of those chocolate chips,
look at the size of that, they're little nubbins right now because we mixed and we mixed and it blended into our cookie dough. We also don't want that so that's another good reason why you mix until just combined. You don't want to break down the integrity of the chocolate. That's all that being said, let's check out the result of how these two doughs, just with the difference of over mixing, turned out and the results speak for themselves. So look at this. This is our cookie dough mixed until just the flour was combined and it all came together and we stopped. No gluten development and if I break one open there you go. Look at that. It's a thicker cookie and it has a tender crumb, almost melts in your mouth. Now look at these bad boys.
Much flatter, not the same structure or integrity, tougher. You could say crisper but the word is tougher. Very flat cookie because I mixed it a lot and not as an enjoyable eating experience and not the result I want from my cookies. Now this next mistake I will admit I'm even guilty of making. Mistake number three, skipping the chill. So let me tell you about this. Every single cookie dough I make I chill. Even when the recipe says you don't have to chill it, I chill everything and I'll tell you why. Chilling the cookie dough, it solidifies the fat, it solidifies the butter which means you get less spread. You don't get that thin cookie that we were talking about. You get something that looks like this that has a thickness to
it and has some structure. So that's number one why we chill. Number two, I think this is actually the most important, it is flavour. So we're talking about chilling a dough, we're talking about ageing a dough. Aging just like with a sourdough improves flavour, time improves flavour. What happens when these go into the fridge is that it concentrates the flavour. The liquid will actually start to evaporate from the dough concentrating the flavour which is so far superior than cookies that are baked off. So when you think about like sourdough, sourdough cookies even, sourdough brownies, that flavour is what we're going for here.
Ageing cookie doughs is so important. If you've never done it before, your world of cookies just blew right open because this is what you always want to be doing. If you really want to age it, you can leave your cookie dough in a ball or you can scoop it, put it into the fridge for up to three days. You will notice a dramatic change in flavour but also in texture. Look at this, this dough has been chilled really well. You can see that it has created divots, there's crinkle in this cookie just like the way we see in the bakery style cookies that we love and the flavour has improved. Also look at that colour, beautiful golden brown. That is what we're going for. Now
if you are rushing to make your cookies and you couldn't wait the hour, follow me over here to a soft room temperature dough and this is what it yields you. Look at this, a pancakey looking cookie, no beautiful lovely crinkles, no divots, no character, less flavour and it's so pale. In comparison to this, look at that, completely different. I'll tell you which cookie that I want to be eating and it ain't this one. Look at that, beautiful. So that's the difference right there in front of your eyes. Aging cookie doughs and starting to do processes like this makes you a better baker. It also makes you understand recipes more and the reason I love it is that it really makes your baked goods, your cookies really shine and stand out.
The next time you have a cookie swap at Christmas when you're doing a bake sale, they're going to be going for these cookies. Now I'm actually going to take a moment to answer some of your hotline questions all about cookies. So here's a great question and perfectly timed. Can I freeze my dough to shorten the chilling time? Yes you absolutely can. That will solidify your dough, solidify the fat, it will make it spread less, it will work. But what you're not doing is developing any flavour. So that's a fast fix and it will work to bake off your cookies straight away. What
I recommend is chilling for as long as you can to develop that flavour and texture of the cookie. So that's just my two cents worth. If you don't have time to wait, pop them into the freezer. It's not a big deal. So here's a great question. I actually get asked this a lot. This is for my best ever chocolate chip cookies which are really fantastic. Somebody asked, can I use less sugar or will it affect the texture? So here's the thing. When you change any recipe, just know that it's more than likely you will affect the end result. You will not get the same result as you see in the picture, as you saw on my website, if you change the recipe. So if you want exactly what I got, don't change the recipe.
Follow the rules. We test our recipes so well that we really know how they work. If you lessen the sugar, you can do that. If you want to consume less sugar, just know that you might get a slightly different cookie. And just a note, the purpose of sugar in a cookie is to add sweetness, yes, but it's kind of more important job is actually to add moisture, especially the brown sugar. It has more moisture than the white sugar. The moisture gives you more caramel flavours and a gluey or softer centre. So if you reduce the sugar, you're also cutting that back. So just be wary of that one. If you've got a baking question for me, ask in the comments below and you might be featured in an upcoming video. For now, let's get back to section four.
Mistake four, let's talk pans. Now, I don't know if you know this, but the type of pan you use can directly affect how your cookie bake. So baking on a dark pan just like this one will actually make your cookie bake faster and brown more. When you're following a recipe that says bake for 12 minutes and after eight minutes, your cookies looks like this, then your cookies overbaking. When you bake on a lighter pan, it bakes more evenly and it doesn't absorb extra heat over cooking your cookie. So it's really important when you're talking about something that really the precision of timing is everything to give you that result you want to be a crispy, soft in the middle of whatever it is. And you can see
from those two results, these cookies are very different. I'm not saying don't bake on dark pans. Everybody has dark pans. But if you are, just lessen the time and keep an eye on your cookies. And when your cookie cooks faster, browns faster, you end up with a hard cookie. And this one is actually soft in the middle and has some give. I don't know about you, but that's the cookie I want. So mistake number five is oven temperature. Now the standard for baking most cookies is 350, and that's this guy right here. That's what my chip ahoy recipe calls for. It gives you a light golden brown around the outside and it still is a little bit soft in the middle, which is what we like. Baking at 325 degrees Fahrenheit, you end up with a cookie
who just didn't bake enough. Pale, a little bit softer, and just not as appetizing. You also don't get the comparison of crisp around the edges and soft in the middle, which is what 350 gives you. So 375 for this type of cookie, which is a chip ahoy, it makes it really hard all the way through and dry. And that's not what you want. I do have recipes for, you know, those lovely, gooey, center chocolate chip cookies, and I do bake those at 375, but for a shorter period of time. So if you wanted to do that, you can with this cookie dough, but you have to bake it for less time. Each time gives you different results. So you have to really go for what you're looking for. For a chip ahoy style cookie, the best result is brown on the outside like this and a
little bit soft in the middle. This last tip is both from a professional chef who made thousands of cookies over her career, and as a mom who goes to many play dates and park dates and has friends over to the house, and we want cookies to eat. Freeze your cookie dough, scoop it into balls when it's soft like this. You can put it into the fridge for a few days, then pop it into the freezer in bags, label them. Frozen cookie dough is the best thing to have on hand, even for a dinner party. It's just so fantastic, it's so easy. You can shush it up, you can use them to make ice cream sandwiches, whatever it is. It is an instant dessert.
Taking them out of the freezer to frost them at room temperature and bake them off fresh. People will have no idea how you were able to do it with such ease and you don't have to tell them. Okay, so in conclusion, we've learned a lot today. The perfect way to get the most gorgeous looking cookie that we see online is to make sure that your butter is the correct temperature, that you do not over mix your dough, you just mix it until it's just combined. You chill your dough super important for texture and flavor. And lastly, baking them perfectly, which comes down to the pan that you use and how long you bake them for in the oven. All those things added up together
equals the ultimate chocolate chip cookie. So as you can see, yes, baking is a science, but it's not rocket science. If you follow the steps and the method correctly, you will get amazing results. A cookie is definitely a sum of all its parts, add them all up together and you get great results. Knowing the correct way is important, but knowing the why is even more so. Understanding the roles of each ingredient and the correct method will make you a better, more confident baker. Well, bakers, I hope you enjoyed this deep dive into cookie making and let me know in the comments below what's the biggest
issue you face when making cookies. You can always DM us and send us messages on social media and we'll be sure to get back to them. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you back here again really soon.
