60+ Cookie Dough Recipes! (2024)

FAQs

What does too much brown sugar do to cookies? ›

Brown sugar adds a beautiful color as well as a more complex flavor. They'll also make cookies chewier, softer, and thicker than white sugar. Adding too much can result in dark brown cookies. Adding too little results in paler cookies.

You can think of it like marinating meats – everything intensifies and gets better with time. It gives the liquid in the egg a chance to hydrate the starch in the flour, making the dough firmer, which helps the cookie spread less in the oven (hello, thick cookies!).

When the cookie dough reaches 92 degrees, the butter starts to melt and all the water trapped inside the butter turns into steam. Since the butter is melting, the cookie dough starts to look like it's melting too and starts transforming from a round ball to a flatter cookie-like shape.

In that role, white sugar aerates the dough when creamed with butter for thick and puffy cookies. 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.

Regarding the extra acidity of dark brown sugar, acid activates baking soda, so if you use dark brown sugar to make, say, cookies, your cookies will rise higher, but only slightly.

To stay on the safe side, it is probably not highly recommended that you eat expired cookie dough, however you can eat it up to 1 or 2 months past it's best by date, if you ensure that you have stored it properly.

Popping your dough in the fridge allows the fats to cool. As a result, the cookies will expand more slowly, holding onto their texture. If you skip the chilling step, you're more likely to wind up with flat, sad disks instead of lovely, chewy cookies. Cookies made from chilled dough are also much more flavorful.

The Food Marketing Institute's FoodKeeper recommends storing commercially prepared cookie dough, either unopened or opened, in the refrigerator and use it before the date on the label. For best quality, freeze for two months.

Cool down your dough for a tastier, chewier cookie.

As little as 30 minutes in your fridge or freezer can help your cookie brown better, spread less, and develop a richer chewy texture. There's a few reasons why, but one important part is it gives the butter in your dough a chance to firm up before baking.

Both the flour and the egg ingredients should be cooked for food safety reasons. What makes Pillsbury's refrigerated cookie and brownie doughs ready to eat raw? We use heat treated flour and pasteurized eggs so you can now safely enjoy our cookie dough baked or raw. Pillsbury Cookie Dough Poppins contains no egg.

Does refrigerating cookie dough make it taste better? ›

The texture improves after chilling.

Refrigerating the dough for even 30 minutes can improve the texture and flavor of even a tried-and-true Toll House recipe.

If there isn't enough egg, your batter or dough may not be able to hold its structure or could end up overly dry or dense. On the other hand, if there is too much egg, your baked goods could lose their shape due to excess liquid, or have a rubbery (or even overly cakey) texture depending on the recipe.

350° is the standard temp for a cookie, and it's a great one. Your cookies will bake evenly and the outside will be done at the same time as the inside. Baking at 325° also results in an evenly baked cookie, but the slower cooking will help yield a chewier cookie. The outsides will be a little softer, too.

As a general rule of thumb, you should refrigerate cookie dough for at least 30 minutes and up to 24 hours. More than that, and you won't see a noticeable difference in the final product.

More importantly, even if you manage to break it into bits, hard brown sugar is, well, hard. This problem means it won't dissolve and mix evenly into your batter. When your baked goods come out of the oven, they're likely to have little brown sugar pellets.

Brown sugar is often used in baking for the flavor and moistness it adds to baked goods. The molasses in brown sugar also helps to prevent cookies and cakes from drying out. It generally makes baked goods softer and moister.

Brown sugar, on the other hand, contains more moisture and is slightly acidic, so cookies made with mostly brown sugar will be chewier and rise higher (because the baking soda reacts to the acid in the sugar).

By adding extra sugar, you can bake the cookies to a slightly higher temperature without over-baking, which will allow for a crispier final cookie as well as deeper flavor development.