Mistake: When cookies turn out flat, the bad guy is often butter that is too soft or even melted. This makes cookies spread. The other culprit is too little flour—don’t hold back and make sure you master measuring. Finally, cookies will also flatten if placed and baked on hot cookie sheets.
9 Tips to Remember
- Use Real Butter and Keep It Cool. The low melting point of butter may be what makes your cookies flat.
- Use Shortening.
- Chill Dough Twice.
- Use Parchment Paper or a Silicone Liner.
- Measure Precisely.
- Use Fresh Baking Soda.
- Use Optional Add-Ins.
- Buy an Oven Thermometer.
The Problem: Your Oven Is Too Hot
If your cookies repeatedly turn out flat, no matter the recipe, chances are your oven is too hot. Here’s what’s happening. The butter melts super quickly in a too-hot oven before the other ingredients have firmed up into a cookie structure.
Cookies spread because the fat in the cookie dough melts in the oven. If there isn’t enough flour to hold that melted fat, the cookies will over-spread. Spoon and level that flour or, better yet, weigh your flour. If your cookies are still spreading, add an extra 2 Tablespoons of flour to the cookie dough.
Baking soda encourages spreading while baking powder puffs the cookies up. If your recipe calls for 1 teaspoon of baking soda, you would use 3 to 4 teaspoons of baking powder.
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.
In most cookie recipes, you are instructed to cream room-temperature butter and sugar together. This is because mixing the butter and sugar granules creates air pockets in the dough, which results in puffier cookies.
Chocolate chips sink when they are too heavy to stay suspended in the batter. The consistency of a batter is most often just part of the characteristics of the recipe you’re making, and there’s no way around that.
Why You Need to Chill Your Cookie Dough. For starters, chilling prevents cookies from spreading out too quickly once they’re in the oven. If you use a higher fat butter (like Kerrygold), chilling your dough is absolutely essential. Popping your dough in the fridge allows the fats to cool.
To prevent cookies from spreading you have options, like baking at a higher temperature, chilling the cookie dough thoroughly, increasing the amount of flour in the recipe, reducing the sugar slightly, playing with the amount of egg in the recipe, changing the fat used, and many more!
Not Enough Flour
If your cookies are flat, brown, crispy, and possibly even a bit lacy around the edges, that means you need to add flour to your dough for the next batch. Our cookies were brittle and greasy and cooked much faster than the other dough balls on the sheet.
Carbon dioxide gas and water vapor form the bubbles which make cookies rise. Rising doesn’t just make cookies taller. It also opens up space to keep the cookie from becoming too dense. Salt slows down the decomposition of baking soda, so the bubbles don’t get too big.
“Most people think the butter should be so soft that it’s broken down, but the most important thing is that you want a little bit of give to the butter.” If you want to get technical, she says the precise temperature should be between 63 and 68 degrees — where it’s cool to touch, but your finger can leave an indent.
Oven temperature is crucial to perfectly baked cookies. If your oven temperature is too low, it can cause your cookies to spread, yielding thin, tough cookies.
Too much butter causes cookies to spread a lot and ultimately crisp out on the outside being able to completely cook. Extremely chewy cookies (when the recipe isn’t meant to make chewy cookies). This is because of the liquid content in the butter. Moisture helps develop gluten and gluten helps make chewy cookies.
Chilling cookie dough
- Chilling cookie dough for just 30 minutes makes a big difference. The cookies pictured above are the same size, weight-wise.
- The longer you chill cookie dough, the smaller the changes become.
- Over time, chilling cookie dough produces cookies with darker color and more pronounced flavor.
And because baking soda also introduces carbon dioxide, or air, to the dough, too much of it will create a cookie that’s cakey rather than chewy.
Generally for 1 or 2-inch-deep pans, you will fill them 1/2 full of batter. For pans that are 3 or 4-inch-deep, the batter needs to be about 2/3 full.
Having too much flour in your cookies will make them tender, and even crumbly. This is apparent in shortbread cookies, which are well known for being dry and soft. What is this? This will often happen when you use a high amount of flour in cookies that have very few wet ingredients, such as eggs and butter.
(Exactly) How to Make Fluffy Cookies: 11 Genius Tips for Puffy…
- Make Sure Your Baking Soda and Baking Powder aren’t Expired.
- Use Baking Powder instead of Baking Soda.
- Roll Your Dough Balls into Cylinders.
- Chill the Dough.
- Use a Silicone Mat, not a Greased Baking Sheet.
- Add another Egg Yolk.
How To Make Thicker Cookies (Using 10 Simple Tips)
- 1 – Refrigerate Your Cookie Dough.
- 2 – Use Room-Temperature Butter.
- 3 – Use the Correct Fat.
- 4 – Focus on Your Mixing Technique.
- 5 – Add Less Granulated Sugar.
- 6 – Add More Flour.
- 7 – Use Bleached Flour.
- 8 – Check Your Rising Agent.
Baking powder simply adds carbon dioxide to the equation, providing a more forceful pressure that encourages a dough to spread up and out. Without the well-developed elasticity of a bread dough, the strands of gluten in cookies would sooner snap than stretch, cracking along the surface.
Water vapor escaping from the dough in combination with the carbon dioxide released by our baking soda is ultimately what makes our cookies light and airy.
Resting cookie dough in the fridge can make it harder to scoop out into individual portions. To counter this, scoop and roll your cookie dough before putting it in the fridge. Scooping freshly mixed dough is so much easier, and you’ll still get the benefits of resting 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.
Most cookies are baked at a fairly high temperature for a short time. Why would you double-pan a batch of cookies? To prevent burning the bottoms of the cookies.
Most cookies have top crusts that remain relatively soft and flexible as the cookies set during baking. However, if the top surface dries out before the cookie is finished spreading and rising, it hardens, cracks, and pulls apart, producing an attractive crinkly, cracked exterior.
Baking soda is generally about three times stronger than baking powder, so adjust your recipe accordingly. Baking soda and baking powder can produce cookies with different textures. Baking soda is typically used for chewy cookies, while baking powder is generally used for light and airy cookies.
Greased cookie sheets promote spreading. Giving your cookies something with friction to cling onto, so to speak—like an ungreased baking sheet or one lined with parchment or Silpat—can slow the spreading. A greased sheet just encourages hot, melting cookie dough to run further. Butter that’s too cold.
Eggs are responsible for giving baked goods structure, which means the amount you use directly affects the resulting texture. Using too few eggs will make your desserts dense, but using too many will make them rubbery. The explanation for this lies in the fact that eggs are made up of protein.
Flour is the main ingredient that provides structure in a cookie – without it, there would be no cookie! The gluten in flour forms a web of sorts – the framework that catches the air bubbles/gasses given off during rising.
Salt. Without this flavor enhancer, the secondary flavors in a cookie fall flat as the sweetness takes over. Salt also strengthens the protein in a dough, making cookies chewier. Kosher salt and table salt are identical in flavor, so you can use them interchangeably if you adjust for volume differences.
LOWER THE TEMPERATURE
“When you bake at a lower temperature, you will get that perfect cookie with a soft center and crisp exterior,” she adds. Just make sure you increase baking time by a couple of minutes or you will end up with gooey underbaked cookies.
At a temperature between 70 and 72 degrees F, butter is soft enough to incorporate air, but not so soft that it will melt immediately in the oven and result in super-thin cookies.
Using melted butter in cookies helps you achieve a similar fudgy-yet-cooked texture and prevents any unwanted cakiness. Instead of the rise coming from both chemical and physical leavening agents (baking soda/powder + creamed butter), it now comes almost exclusively from chemical agents alone.
Your Butter Came Straight From the Fridge
This relates to the issue of creaming, because cold butter is more difficult to cream. Thus, if your butter is too cold, your cookies will be denser, and they will likely not spread enough in the pan when you bake them. In general, you want your butter to be cool, but not cold.
Too much butter makes cookies turn out just as you’d expect: very buttery. This batch of cookies was cakey in the middle, but also airy throughout, with crispy edges.
The most common cause is using a different flour than usual, such as cake flour, and measuring flour with too heavy a hand. Using larger eggs than called for can make cookies cakey, as will the addition of milk or more milk or other liquids than specified.
Baked cookies should not be refrigerated.
Place one baking sheet at a time onto center rack of preheated 350 degree F oven. Bake until cookies are golden around the edges, still have pale tops, and are soft in the center, about 8 to 10 minutes. (Do not overbake! They will firm up more during cooling.)
The ideal thickness to roll out your sugar cookie dough is about 1/4″–that way, they’ll be tough enough to be handled and decorated, but thin enough to stay a little crunchy.
If you have a baking recipe that calls for baking soda, and you only have baking powder, you may be able to substitute, but you will need 2 or 3 times as much baking powder for the same amount of baking soda to get the same amount of leavening power, and you may end up with something that’s a little bitter tasting, …
What Happens to Cookies without Baking Soda? If you have a recipe that asks for baking soda and you leave it out completely, your cookies will likely be extremely dense as there was no chemical reaction to introduce those gas bubbles and give it rise.
Brown sugar, meanwhile, is dense and compacts easily, creating fewer air pockets during creaming—that means that there’s less opportunity to entrap gas, creating cookies that rise less and spread more. With less moisture escaping via steam, they also stay moist and chewy.
Let your baking sheets cool a few minutes so they’re warm, not screaming hot. Then rinse them off under room temperature water until they’re no longer hot to the touch. Dry them off and place your cookies on the magically cool sheets.
For those ooey, gooey chocolate chip cookies, 375 degrees Fahrenheit is your sweet spot. It’s the perfect temperature to ensure super crispy exterior edges, while leaving the center slightly underdone and, thus, doughy and fudgey.
Bake at 375 degrees F until golden and tender, 12 to 15 minutes. For crispy-cakey cookies: Bake the cookies at 425 degrees F until golden and crunchy on the outside, 8 to 10 minutes.
Pastry Flour: An unbleached flour made from soft wheat, with protein levels somewhere between cake flour and all-purpose flour (8 to 9 percent). Pastry flour strikes the ideal balance between flakiness and tenderness, making it perfect for pies, tarts and many cookies.
Lining a baking sheet when making cookies: Not only will the parchment help cookies bake more evenly, the non-stick quality also helps prevent them from cracking or breaking when lifting them off the sheet. Decorating home-baked goods: Parchment paper makes the perfect wrapper for baked goods.
If you reduce the amount of butter or oil in a recipe, your cookies won’t spread as much. If you add too much flour, your cookies won’t spread as much. If your cookies have more brown sugar than white sugar, they won’t spread as much. It’s a careful balance.
Not Enough Flour
If your cookies are flat, brown, crispy, and possibly even a bit lacy around the edges, that means you need to add flour to your dough for the next batch. Our cookies were brittle and greasy and cooked much faster than the other dough balls on the sheet.
Baking soda encourages spreading while baking powder puffs the cookies up. If your recipe calls for 1 teaspoon of baking soda, you would use 3 to 4 teaspoons of baking powder.
Carbon dioxide gas and water vapor form the bubbles which make cookies rise. Rising doesn’t just make cookies taller. It also opens up space to keep the cookie from becoming too dense. Salt slows down the decomposition of baking soda, so the bubbles don’t get too big.
Cookie sheet is too warm. If you reuse a cookie sheet that has just been taken out of the oven, it is too hot and will cause your cookies to spread. Always use at least two cookie sheets, and always allow them to cool before putting more cookie dough on them.
Chilling cookie dough
- Chilling cookie dough for just 30 minutes makes a big difference. The cookies pictured above are the same size, weight-wise.
- The longer you chill cookie dough, the smaller the changes become.
- Over time, chilling cookie dough produces cookies with darker color and more pronounced flavor.
When added to cake, cookie and shortbread recipes, cornstarch helps create a crumbly and tender dessert-like texture. Commercially, cornstarch is often used as an anti-caking agent.
And because baking soda also introduces carbon dioxide, or air, to the dough, too much of it will create a cookie that’s cakey rather than chewy.
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.