Wednesday, October 27, 2010

How To Bake Wonderful Homemade Cookies

By Tameka Weeks

Everyone loves homemade cookies, as they taste much nicer than store bought cookies. There is something very comforting about a chocolate chip cookie fresh from the oven, and they smell heavenly. It helps to understand why certain ingredients need to be used in cookies.

The main ingredient of cookies is flour, and its important because it adds colour and flavour, and also some nutrients. Flour contains a lot of starch, and it is this that holds the shape of the cookie, and helps the dough to expand while cooking. Egg yolks give the mixture a richness an more flavour, while the egg whites offer additional strength and also stability.

It is nice to use butter in the mix, although other fats can be used. Butter makes a richer mix, and helps the dough to rise as it traps air during mixing. Adding sugar to cookies makes them sweeter and helps to prevent them from becoming stale. Cookies with a lot of sugar in them tend to be softer. You will need to add baking powder to help your cookies to rise.

The basic cookie dough can have a lot of different flavours added to it. The classic flavour is of course chocolate, but spiced cookies can be lovely. You may even make boozy cookies by adding rum or brandy to the dough.

Before you start, be sure to have decent baking trays and accurate measures. A good baking tray will have a heavy base to distribute the heat evenly during the cooking. All the ingredients must be measured out as accurately as you can to get a successful dough.

Your ingredients will perform best if they are at room temperature. Cookies can easily be mixed by hand. A good mixing technique is to use a figure of eight action to combine the ingredients together. Make sure that you shape the cookies according to the recipe, and check the oven frequently to ensure they do not burn.

A simple cookie recipe can involve as few as six different ingredients. These are flour, sugar, butter, salt, one egg and baking powder. Just mix five cups of flour with three cups of sugar. Add one and a half teaspoons of salt and two tablespoons of baking powder. Add one and a half cups of softened butter to the dry ingredients and combine until the mix is crumbly. Mix in on egg and your cookie mix is ready. At this point you can add other flavourings such as chocolate, spices and vanilla. If you would like to make chocolate chip cookies, then just add one cup of chocolate chips and half a cup of brown sugar to the mix. Bake at one hundred and ninety degrees Celsius or three hundred and seventy degrees Fahrenheit for about eight minutes, then enjoy your homemade cookies.

homemade cookies

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