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I get asked a lot about what cookie recipe I use and how I actually make them and bake them. So, today I'll share with you and I'll show you my few tweaks that I've learned over the years to make my recipe more suitable to myself and have great reviews from my customers and my friends and family that eat my cookies regularly. So, let's get started.
Ingredients
4 cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoon salt
1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
2 large eggs
2 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
Things We Need
1.Measuring Cup
2.Spatula
3.paddle attachment
4.Mixer
5.Teaspoons
So, what we'll need today is measuring cups specifically one cup and a half cup and then you're going to need your spatula and a teaspoon. So, then we're going to have our paddle attachment with our mixer. If you don't have a KitchenAid stand with a paddle attachment you can use your regular mixer and then switch over to the dough hook when we get to the dough part so we're going to start with our butter which is at room temperature.
Well, mine is almost at room temperature so I've chopped it up a bit and then I have my brown sugar as well as my white sugar we're going to dump it all into the bowl to start with altogether. Now I just want to talk about brown sugar in the recipe this is why I really like this recipe. Because it includes brown sugar. I feel like there's so much more flavor that comes from it versus just all white sugar or even some recipes that call for powdered sugar.
It's all personal preference, so it doesn't really matter, but I like how the brown sugar sort of caramelizes in the oven and gives it some great flavor. So, here we are we're just seeing everything being dumped into the bowl and then we're gonna proceed to put it into the mixer. So, I have a kitchen aid mixer here with the paddle attachment.
If you don't have one no worries just use your regular mixer but like I said further down you will have to change it to a dough hook. If you have one because the dough does get pretty stiff this one can handle it. But usually, the smaller mixers have a little bit more trouble when the dough gets a little too tough.
Procedure
Step 1
So, I'm just going to start at a low speed here to incorporate my butter and sugar. So, we don't have things flying out everywhere and I'm going to crank up this bead a few notches just to get it going and to whip up that butter and sugar together we just want to make it more creamy and cohesive.
So, we'll let that run for a couple minutes until you see that the texture has changed. You can see it's still looking crumbly now but in a little bit um it'll come together and just remember every once in a while scrape down your bowl. I find especially with these mixtures that the bowl is pretty deep, so you want to make sure that you're getting everything out of the bottom of there.
So, again I'll just turn my speed back up it's on a sort of just under medium nice and medium-low. And then once you start to see the batter coming together there it's kind of creaming together the color lightens just a little bit then you know. You're ready for the next step.
Step 2
So I've got my eggs here and I'm just going to add some vanilla to my eggs. If you do have real vanilla it helps the flavor comes through a lot better. If you don't know worries imitation vanilla works just as well and so there's one more thing that I like to add to this recipe that isn't called for in the original and it's to add butter flavor from Lauren's it's an emulsion.
So, it's quite strong and it doesn't lose the flavor in the oven like some other let's say extract. So, it really brings out the butteriness and the buttery flavor of the cookies and it really complements well with the brown sugar. You know cake or craft stores and if you can add it I assure you it tastes great. So, I'm just gonna add the eggs the vanilla, and the butter emulsion all together.
I usually try to add one egg mix it in a little bit and then add the second one and again we're gonna sort of cream the butter. Sugar and the eggs all together now and every once in a while just check your bowl make sure you scrape down the side so that everything is getting mixed in nice and good.
Step 3
We can move on to the next step just going to scrape my bowl down one more time just to make sure everything's in there, there's no sugar stuck in the bottom and we're ready to go. So, I've measured out my flour and I just gonna add some salt and some baking powder to it. Now I just want to talk about the baking powder usually people like to leave it out completely or just put a tiny bit the recipe only calls for about a quarter teaspoon.
I believe actually like to put a full teaspoon in there, people worry about spread if they add baking powder but the thing is baking powder makes your cookies sort of taller. Instead of wider so I do like to put a little bit more just to make them not so dense and I find that I don't really get much spread my cookies hold their shape really well.
So, I'm just going to give this a quick stir and now we're ready to add it to our butter sugar egg mixture so again if you don't have one of these heavy-duty mixers you might need to change over to a dough hook. Once we add a little bit more of the flour so just be aware of that. So, I'm going to slowly add the flour a bit at a time to make sure that it all kind of gets incorporated.
And you want to sort of mix every so often let it go for a few seconds 10 to 15 seconds just so the dough can rehydrate itself and there's not flour flying out of your bowl everywhere. Okay so every once in a while you do want to scrape the sides of your bowl and get right to the bottom of your bowl to make sure that everything is getting evenly incorporated.
Now again the recipe talks about the amount of flour to use. I found I find I start with about four cups of flour I and the reason being I've tried with a little bit of less flour a little bit of more flour and I found this works best for me. I don't necessarily like too soft of a dough what I find is when I roll them out and transfer them to the cookie sheet.
Suggestions
I would suggest you probably need a little bit more flour than you if let's say you let your dough you roll it out and then you stick it in the fridge for a bit or you let it sit on the counter for half an hour. And get back to it and rolling because the longer the dough sits the more it kind of firms up. The dough is a little bit firm for this you can squish it between your hands. It will work properly for you.
And another thing is too if your butter was really warm your dough may need a little bit more flour because your dough will be softer. Okay, here I can see my dough looks pretty good. It's got quite a bit of flour in it and I'm just playing with my hands to see you can see the dough looks crumbly.
So I'm gonna grab my cookie sheets um I use dark pans a lot of people use lighter pans. They don't like their cookies browning again I really like the browning or the golden brown edges and bottoms. Because it gets that flavor from brown sugar and then you just need your cookie cutters whether you have metal ones or 3d plastic ones. It doesn't matter you can use whatever you have on hand and then also, I use parchment paper to roll my cookies.
I have two long pieces of parchment paper and the reason being is if your parchment paper is moving around too much on the counter if it's a long piece. To make sure everything's combined you can see a few pieces are coming out. So, I just like to pick those all up in my dough, and then I place it between the two pieces of parchment paper, and then when I put the top piece on I will squish it down first with my hands.
Just to sort of flatten out the dough a little bit and then I'll start to roll it just makes it easier to roll out. like that the beginning gets a little bit tough the dough is like I said it's a stronger sort of dough because of all the flour that we put in there. So, I just roll it out and I don't have guides a lot of people use they have rolling pins with guides on them. So, you can roll them exactly even all across the dough. So, all your cookies are the same height.
You know not to machine cut basically and over you know when you have done it so many times it kind of comes naturally to see how thick and thin your cookies My dough is nicely evenly shaped. A little bit just to loosen the dough the same thing with 3d cutters, it depends on which ones you get you to know some are better than others.
But again I do the same thing I push it down and wiggle it a little bit in the dough just to loosen the sides of the shape. Now again because my dough is on the thicker side the sort of more firm side I don't have too many issues with my cutter sticking to my dough that's one of the advantages of adding enough flour to your dough. But if you do find that your cutters are sticking to your dough and you're not getting clean shapes you can always dip them in a little bit of flour or cornstarch.
And you can use that to push them through and they shouldn't be sticking to your cutters. So what I like to do is to take the dough that I rolled out and any excess and I like to put it in a bowl on the side. I don't want to roll my dough too many times. So, then I'll put everything to the side, and then I'll come back to it once I've rolled all my the original dough.
I usually take the pieces around the cutouts out and then what I'll do is I'll put my hand underneath the parchment paper and I'll sort of lift up the piece of the dough, the cookie that I have there and I'll try to flip it either onto my hand or I'll try to pick it up with my hand if my dough is firm enough. This one sat around for a little bit while we're filming so it's quite firm.
So, I was able just to pick them up and place them on the sheet-like that this way I'm not damaging the shape I'm not getting my fingerprints in them. By trying to pick up the edge so they stay nice and crisp and clean.
So now when I have all my cutouts on the cookie sheet now the recipe doesn't necessarily call for this. But I do like to do it just as an extra precautionary measure to have no more spread is to put them in the fridge for a little bit just for 10 to 15 minutes.
I usually wait until I see the edges are sort of golden brown. I know a lot of people like to see their cookies nice and white and not like any color on the bottom of them but, to be honest, um I've tried that and I don't like the flavor it just does not taste baked to me and it doesn't have very much flavor. So, like I said these ones have brown sugar they have some color to them, and when you bake them that brown sugar sort of caramelizes in the oven.
And when you let it get that sort of the golden color I find it takes it to the next level and it's a really important step that I find people may not know okay guys so that is exactly how I make my cookies and roll them out you can see there are a few additions there to the recipe. But they came out perfect the shapes are great they're ready to go and decorated and they taste great.So, if you guys like this recipe leave a comment in the comment box.
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