To Kickstart Your Holiday Prep, We Answered All Your Cookie Questions
Welcome to Hotline Rewind, the weekly series where we gather up your questions from the week (and pepper in some from the Hotline archives) about a specific culinary topic. Because the holidays are officially here, we’re fully focused on the bite-sized, highly decorated world of cookies. We've received tons of questions over the years—and many in the last week!—about the intricacies of baking. Here are a few of the most common ones:
My cookies always spread! What am I doing wrong?
This almost always comes down to fat: if you’re doing a classic cookie recipe with creamed butter and sugar, it’s likely that you are either using butter that is too warm or borderline-melted, or you’re not chilling the dough. A lot of cookie recipes don’t require chilling, but I think almost every cookie would benefit from 10 to 20 minutes in the freezer pre-bake.