The Important Step To Not Forget When Making Cookies
Probably to no one's real surprise, Americans pair more than 2 billion cookies with their ice cream and milk by the end of each year (per South Florida Reporter) — which means most of the U.S. has baked their way through an impressive amount of cookie recipes. However, even if you consider yourself a baked good pro, you may actually be forgetting an important step in the cookie-making process.
After preparing countless snickerdoodles for Santa and plenty of thumbprint cookies for your friends' parties you know that there are a few things that must go into a delicious cookie dough. As Hershey's reports, all good cookies (chocolate chip or otherwise), have butter, sugar, eggs, salt, and flour in their recipe. However, just mixing these ingredients together and popping them onto a baking tray is a big no-no. Because before you do anything else, Insider reports you need to cream (or whip) your sugar and butter. Here's why creaming your butter and sugar will ensure your cookies are soft and delectable.
Why you need to cream your cookie dough's base
So what makes creaming so important? According to Insider, this baking technique (which involves mixing butter and sugar together for an extended amount of time), causes air bubbles to form in your cookie dough-in-progress. And these happy little bubbles are what make your cookies' texture as light-as-feather. In other words, as Food Network reports, by forcing air into your batter, creaming your butter and sugar causes your dessert to have a pillowy "structure" and prevents your treat from flattening out while baking.
And if you're wondering what happens if you skip creaming the sugar and butter in your chocolate chip cookie dough, the simple answer is nothing good. According to Land O'Lakes, you'll end up with scoops of dough that are too thick — which spells bad news for your treat. Because after they are in the oven, your cookies will turn out dense instead of light and fluffy. And if you want to avoid making Santa sad when he bites into his favorite snack on Christmas Eve, you need to know how to properly cream your butter and sugar.
The best methods for creaming your butter and sugar
To ensure you're creaming your butter and sugar right, Martha Stewart reports that you need to start with room-temperature butter. Once you've made certain your butter isn't too soft or too hard, you should then beat the two ingredients together on medium speed. According to Insider, it can take up to five minutes for your ingredients to properly cream. However, the same outlet reports you'll know your butter and sugar are finished creaming when your mixture appears "pale and fluffy."
Of course, there are also a few "don'ts" to remember when creaming. As Martha Stewart notes, beating your mixture too fast could result in adding too-big air bubbles to your cookies that will make them fall and flatten. And Land O'Lakes states that beating your butter and sugar for too long will make your would-be-creamed mixture fall apart. Not to mention, after you cream your ingredients, you still need to make sure you only drop room-temperature eggs into your dough. And Martha Stewart advises that you slowly add your egg to the bowl to make completely certain the batter's air bubbles are kept intact. But once you've done that, you'll be on track to make a fluffy batch of sugar cookies.