Cookie tips from the pros

How can you make consistently good cookies and bars? Here are some suggestions.

Make your cookies small. The giant cookies sold in malls by bakeries and cookie

companies are made large mainly to save on labor. Cookie-making is time consuming.

Small cookies are easier to eat, look prettier and show that they are home-made and

shaped with care, a definite plus in this day and age of store-bought everything.

If you have a standard oven, make cookies one large sheet at a time. Cookies are very

sensitive to variations in oven temperature, and with two or more sheets in the oven at

different heights, cookies on different sheets will bake to a different crispness, some a

little burned, some underdone. Since most cookies take only about 10 minutes in the

oven, baking one sheet at a time does not add substantially to the length of your baking

project.

In a convection oven the temperature is relatively uniform throughout, and you can

successfully bake several sheets of cookies on different racks in the same time. Watch your

cookies closely because convection ovens also have some temperature variations,

particularly if you restrict air circulation by large cookie sheets.

Make several batches of cookies while you are at it, and store some for future use. You

can freeze them either baked or unbaked. It is simple to defrost the already baked

cookies, then refresh them in an oven for 3 or 4 minutes, set at the same temperature they

were originally baked at. You will not be able to tell the difference between these and

truly fresh-baked cookies. To freeze, shaped raw drop cookies, put the mounds close

together on a cookie sheet and set the sheet in the freezer for half an hour. (Set your timer

so you won’t forget.) Then take the frozen dough off the sheet, label and include baking

directions and store them in a heavy plastic bag in the freezer. They will stay as

individual pieces. When you need them, place them on a cookie sheet about two fingers

apart, let them warm up for about 15 minutes and bake as usual.

Remove baked cookies within a couple of minutes from the cookie sheet, or they may

stick to the sheet as they cool. Many cookies are too soft and tender to remove at once

while hot without breaking, but in a couple of minutes they harden (set your timer), then

finish cooling on a wire rack. If you forget to remove baked cookies immediately and

they stick, put the sheet back in the hot oven just long enough to heat them up. The

cookies should come off easier.

Greasing cookie sheets is not necessary unless the dough is low in fat. In fact, the cookie

dough has a tendency to spread too much during baking if you heavily greased the baking

sheet. Greasing is necessary for squares because the depth of the pan makes it hard to

remove the pieces even if they are only slightly stuck.

Wait until a pan of bars cools before cutting and removing them from the pan but as soon

as they are out of the oven, score them skin-deep, then finish cutting up when cool. This

extra step helps for neater cuts because the scoring cuts thrugh the top layer that dries out

on cooling and makes neat cuts difficult.

Cookie dough may spread out thin and flat if the oven temperature is too low. If your

cookies turn out dry and pale with burnt bottoms, the oven temperature may be too high.

Pies, Tarts, Cobblers

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