A Pastry Chef’s 2-Minute Trick for Excellent 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 bored with was tips on how to make a superbly spherical cookie. After all, there are lots of variables that may have an effect on how and why a cookie spreads, together with the sort 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 fully flat to ensure that it to bake into a superbly spherical circle.)

However within the quest to create a superbly 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 must use a hoop cutter that’s an inch or two bigger than the baked cookie, and you must 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 inconceivable to form.

After all, how a cookie tastes is far more necessary 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 if you’re 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 depart you with flawlessly spherical cookies that look professionally made.