Advice | 6 cookie baking tips we’ve learned from smart recipes (2024)

Here are a few of the best tips I’ve gotten from them, along with the accompanying recipes.

It would be easy to assume that there’s little difference among the various food colorings or dyes you can buy. But that’s not the case. Many that you find on grocery store shelves are liquid dyes. Several of our recent recipes, though, including Kim-Joy’s Shortbread Cookie Animals and Elana Berusch’s Marbled Shortbread, recommend gel food coloring.

Gels are more concentrated and less runny than the alternative, meaning you can get away with less and still have more vibrant colors. With liquid options, you run the risk of making the dough too wet, requiring the use of more flour, and a potentially tougher cookie. I often turn to AmeriColor gels, which are available online, but baking, cake or craft supply stores (i.e. Michaels) may offer gels as well. (Note: Gel food coloring should not be confused with tubes of decorating gel.)

My stand mixer is one of my most prized kitchen possessions, but the truth is, it’s not always the right tool for the job. If you’re only mixing or whipping a small amount of ingredients, there might not be enough in the bowl for the attachment to make sufficient contact. That’s definitely the case with the Amaretti Dipped in Ruby Ganache from Rose Wilde. You start the dough using a hand mixer to whip two egg whites, which is just too skimpy of an amount for the balloon whisk attachment on your typical stand mixer. Of course, you could also go with old-fashioned elbow grease and beat by hand as well.

Whisking together the dry ingredients for a recipe (flour, salt, baking powder or soda, etc.) is a common step in making cookies. But if you don’t do it well, you run the risk of insufficient mixing and, more importantly, unincorporated pockets of ingredients. If you’d like some added insurance that you won’t end up with a salty bite of cookie dough — at least an unintentional one, I love a good flaky salt garnish! — try following Kathryn Pauline’s lead in her Sesame Blossoms. She adds the salt to the mixing bowl when beating butter and sugar. It’s also worth doing that with something like citrus zest, as in our Lemon and Cream Cheese Cookies from Brother Andrew Corriente, to help better extract the flavor and evenly distribute it. Mix the zest with the sugar first until it’s moistened and aromatic, then add the butter and proceed with creaming.

Overmixing cookie dough can make the finished treats tough. It’s especially easy to overmix if you’re making a dough loaded with add-ins in a stand mixer. That’s one reason I appreciate Tara O’Brady’s advice in her Fig and Ginger Terrazzo Tiles With Disco Sugar to not wait until all the flour disappears before stirring the chopped chocolate, figs and crystallized ginger into the dough. Similarly, there’s nothing wrong with pulling the bowl off the mixer and finishing incorporating the ingredients by hand with a spatula.

I don’t know about you, but my fridge always feels about 1 square inch short of overflowing. So when a recipe asks me to portion dough onto two sheet pans before chilling, it can be a scramble to make room. In her Quadruple Chocolate Cookies, Jonni Scott recommends you place all the dough balls onto one sheet to chill and then divide them between the two pans just before baking. I appreciate this acknowledgment that fridge space can be tight, and there’s no reason the dough has to be spaced far apart when refrigerated. Similarly, consider stacking baking sheets! If you have a rack high enough to be safely set over a sheet full of dough, you can take advantage of the vertical space.

I most often think of using an egg wash (eggs or yolks mixed with water) when I’m baking bread, such as challah. However, these gingerbread-adjacent Spiced Spelt Cookies from Arturo Enciso employ an egg wash to create an evenly brown surface with a slight sheen. That’s especially nice when the design is minimal but effective, as is the case with the icing piped to look like a cactus. Hetty Lui McKinnon’s Walnut and Five-Spice Thumbprint Cookies boast an egg wash, too.