Let’s talk… Chewy Cookies! #4 Ingredients
Hiya!
A quick recap: One day it’s beautiful cookies and the next day they transform back into spreading ugly ducklings – what happened?!
After our previous talk on (#3 Leavening), we have finally arrived at the final episode of the Chewy Cookies Series, which is also leading up to my classic chocolate chip cookies recipe. Get excited!!
#4: Ingredients
As mentioned previously, I have been using the same recipe to replicate my cookies. However the fact is, I have been taking it lightly when it comes to picking out the exact ingredients, changing my constants into variables instead.
*Below I have only identified a few ingredients which I may have messed up, there are of course more ingredients required to make cookies.
White sugar: Granulated sugar and caster sugar are basically the same sugar. The main difference between the them is that caster sugar is finer and dissolves more easily. While castor sugar is more suitable for baking fine textured cakes, meringues, angel food etc, granulated sugar may be more suitable in some recipes where creaming is essential for mechanical leavening. As the sugar crystals are larger and have more prominent sharp edges to cut through the butter, granulated sugar allows longer/more formations of air bubbles, which aerates your baked good, as it dissolves slower than caster sugar.
Brown Sugar: The distinct brown colour in brown sugar is due to the presence of molasses, which adds a richer flavour. The acidic content helps to create leaven by reacting with baking soda under heat. However, brown sugar is naturally moist and too much molasses will dampen your baked goods (causing cookies to spread). Light brown sugar contains ~3.5% molasses, while dark brown sugar contains ~6.5% molasses. On the other hand, light and dark muscovado sugar is comparatively unprocessed and raw which contains much more molasses, hence the texture is very moist and has a very rich flavour.
Look at the picture below, can you guess which is muscovado sugar and which is light brown sugar?? 😉
Flour: There are a few benefits from sifting your flour. Sifting helps to aerate the flour and to make sure there are no large lumps; eliminate foreign substances; thoroughly integrate all dry ingredients together. Some recipes do not specify the need for sifting, while those recipes that do usually focuses on a lighter, fluffier and less dense finished product. Therefore, the weight of flour measured for your recipe could be the main issue here, as sifted and non-sifted flour has different volume.
Conclusion
I have been using light brown muscovado sugar, which have evidently made my cookies moister. Besides that, I suspect that amount of flour is not enough which does not form enough gluten to hold the cookies from collapsing.
Overall my biggest speculation is that I have a recipe that may be unsustainable. It is true that I did succeed once upon a time, nevertheless due to my lack of attention then, it seems to be very difficult to replicate the “accidental masterpiece”. I will be better off recreating a new recipe that I am confident with, rather than debugging and wasting too much time. A common mistake many might face that I did notice while doing my research, you should firstly make sure that you have the essential portions of ingredients while experimenting your recipes, especially if you are not an experienced baker.
For example, the recipe I used had a higher proportion of brown sugar than white sugar, which really gives an overpowering and flavorful cookie (YUMS!). If you prefer to cut down sugar for sweetness like I usually practice, you should reduce more brown sugar than white sugar. If you reduce too much white sugar, then your creaming process will be unsuccessful while the molasses content is left unchanged.
Anyway, if you do have a cookie conundrum that you would like some brainstorming sessions. Do feel free to leave some comments below or drop me an email. ☺☺☺ I will finally be able to share my classic chocolate chip cookies recipe in my next post!
Till then, have a great week ahead x
