A Pastry Chef’s 2-Minute Trick for Good Spherical Cookies

A few years in the past, I labored at a café, the place I used to be liable for making tons of of cookies, muffins, and scones every week. A subject of dialog that us bakers (ever the persnickety bunch!) by no means uninterested in was tips on how to make a wonderfully spherical cookie. In fact, there are various variables that may have an effect on how and why a cookie spreads, together with the kind and quantity of chemical leavening used, the temperature of the cookie dough when it’s baked, and the form of the scooped cookie dough. (The pastry chef I labored for was satisfied that the underside of the dough needed to be utterly flat to ensure that it to bake into a wonderfully spherical circle.)

However within the quest to create a wonderfully spherical cookie, I’ve discovered just one methodology to be dependable, and it’s one I picked up from my Birmingham, Alabama-based colleague Nicole Hopper. When Nicole was growing her oatmeal raisin cookie recipe, she discovered that swirling a hoop cutter round every freshly-baked cookie helped form it into a pleasant spherical circle. For this to work, you need to use a hoop cutter that’s an inch or two bigger than the baked cookie, and you need to swirl it across the cookie when it’s nonetheless heat and barely set—ideally instantly after it comes out of the oven. Wait too lengthy, and the cookie will agency up, making it unimaginable to form.

In fact, how a cookie tastes is way more vital than how a cookie appears, and after I’m baking for myself, I couldn’t give a hoot about how they give the impression of being. However in case you are baking cookies for an important day, a bake sale, a vacation swap, or a present basket and need to make every cookie look additional good, then look no additional than a trusty ring cutter. It takes lower than two minutes to form all of the cookies on a rimmed baking sheet, and can go away you with flawlessly spherical cookies that look professionally made.