How to cook perfect cookies

By MICHELE KAYAL
For the Associated Press

What could be better than a cookie? How about a cookie that’s an apple pie, too?

Shortbread, Toll House, peanut butter and plain old sugar. However you make them, people will eat them. But cookies also present an empty canvas for impersonating other treats that may be too bulky, time consuming — or tempting — to enjoy often.

“It takes a lot less time to make a cookie than it does to make a Key lime pie,” says Susan Reid, editor of the King Arthur Flour Company’s newsletter. She’s also the creator of cookies modeled after Key lime pie, peanut brittle and raspberry cheesecake.

“Plus you can get smaller bites. It’s very hard to have a cookie-sized portion of key lime pie and walk away,” she says.

When trying to craft your own cookies that started life as something else, make sure you start with quality ingredients, says Marc Haymon, an assistant baking and pastry instructor at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y.

Inferior butter with low fat and high water content will produce runny cookies. Less expensive brown sugar sometimes is fortified with plain glucose, Reid says, which will leave cookies flat.

And if you’re running into cookie trouble, suspect the ingredients first.

“When you’re baking something you’ve made many times, and it doesn’t come out right, people think it’s themselves,” Reid says. “Most of the time it’s an ingredient shift. Maybe they’ve switched an ingredient to economize.”

Then again, is there such a thing as a bad cookie?

“There’s nothing bad about a cookie,” says Haymon. “Only good things come from cookies.”

Ready to bake up your own batch of goodness? Here are some tips from Reid and Haymon.

Butter vs. shortening

Always use good quality butter with a high fat content to minimize spreading. In the U.S., all butter is graded according to quality, with the finest being “AA”. Alternatively, use shortening, which has a higher melting point than butter and will produce a more crumbly cookie with better color.

Brown sugar — Light vs. dark

Guess what? Color is the only difference. In the old days, dark brown sugar had more molasses, but that’s no longer true. Today, the color difference generally comes from additives. A cup of firmly packed brown sugar can be substituted for a cup of granulated. Some stores also sell pourable and liquid brown sugars; do not use these for baking.

Flour — All-purpose vs. pastry

All-purpose flour has a higher protein content than pastry flour and will produce a more shapely, easier-to-handle dough. Pastry flour will create softer, gooier cookies. Professional bakers debate the merits of each, so it’s really your choice.

Chilled cookie dough

Anything that needs a cookie cutter probably will need to be chilled before baking. Instead of placing the whole ball of dough in the refrigerator, put it in a zip-close plastic bag and roll out with a rolling pin. Stick the disc in the fridge. It will chill faster and be easier to use.

Sticky dough

When dealing with particularly sticky dough, flip the baking sheet over and roll out the dough directly on the back of it. Cut your shapes, then remove the excess from around them. This will preserve the shape of the cookies. They can be baked right there on the back of the cookie sheet.

Freeze and eat

When making drop cookies, fill a cookie sheet with dough balls and place it in the freezer. After 2 hours, transfer the balls to a plastic freezer bag and tuck them away for a snowy day. Frozen cookie dough can be placed directly into the oven. You may need to adjust cooking time by several minutes, so watch the cookies carefully during baking.

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