Let’s talk… Chewy Cookies! #1 Measurements
I am going to start off with everyone’s favourite: classic chocolate chip cookies.
SO a couple of weekends ago, I decided to bake some chocolate chip cookies (at my boyfriend’s place) and they turned out to be the most PERFECT cookies I had ever baked. There might, however, have been some accidental magic whereby I forgot to soften my butter (as the butter has to be soft enough for creaming) so I microwaved the whole pyrex bowl containing the sugar + butter mixture (LOL). The texture wasn’t as coarse after microwaving but definitely was not as runny as using melted butter.
FYI, do NOT follow this procedure please, it is not a tip!
A few days ago, I baked more cookies with the same recipe at my place – no random microwaving this time, but the results were so bad. The cookies were spreading so much that they became one large flattened cookie. The taste was there for sure, but we bakers know how important presentation is!
I thought of a few plausible reasons, which brings me to this Chewy Cookies Series:
- Measurements
- Temperature
- Leavening
- Ingredients
#1: Measuring instruments
I did a short survey and it seems that the vast majority of bakers are converting to only metrics measurements and moving away from cups, i.e. weight over volume. I tend to be quite flexible when I bake – like my cooking, but have realised that baking is much more focused on precision. This premise suggests that I could have messed up (albeit minor) my measurements for the flour and/or the softened butter.
Flour: Currently, I keep my flour in a rectangular bin and I usually use my cup to dig and lightly compress against the sides of the bins. However, if compressing means I am collecting more flour, I think the cookie should have turned up less runny instead.
Butter: The recipe says 1/2 cup butter, 115g. I just sliced off a little less than half of my 250g block of unsalted butter… with my gut feeling. LOL
Hypothesis testing: I baked a new batch of cookies, carefully weighing my measurements down to every gram. I am yet once again devastated as the texture of the cookies was flat, slightly crunchy around the ends, chewy in the middle and melting chocolates creating a bit of a mess.
Conclusion
The cause of my cookies spreading is not due to errors in my measurements, at least not in this series! Nonetheless, I did a few trial runs on measuring flour by volumes using cups. Whether I was using the “dig & sweep” method or “spoon & sweep” method, they have all been proven to be quite inaccurate (picture below using 1/2 cup measuring cup). This is super important as most online measurement converters show that 1 cup of flour is equivalent to ~130g. If you are like me, where you tend to overfill, then you would end up with a significant amount of extra flour per cup!
From now onwards I will be switching over to weighing ingredients for baking, either rewriting my recipes in metric measurements or converting volume to weight. There are many good sources around to convert other measures into weights, but I have attached my little black book in my blog, link here.
* measuring cup weighs 25g
Stay tuned for the next post: Let’s talk… Chewy Cookies! #2 Temperature
