Cookies: Hard to Get Right

I love baking, and one of my favourite things I like to bake are cookies. After all, a cookie cooks a lot quicker than other types of cake and dessert, and you can bake lots of them in one go. But there is a science with cookies, and how to make the sort of cookie you want. Turns out, it’s hard to bake a cookie that matches or betters store-baked stuff.

Okay, sure, there are many types of cookie. In this article, I’m more looking at the big, gooey American cookies, often with chocolate chips and occasionally M&Ms, nuts and more. But frankly, this applies to pretty much every type of cookie.

But why? Well, there’s a few reasons why.

The first reason is that a cookie baked at home probably has a vastly different list of ingredients compared to store-bought ones. Shop cookies have not only more sugar but also far more stabilizers, more chemicals and whatnot, all of which have been scientifically put together in able to ensure that every cookie comes out pretty much exactly the same. Quality control is a major factor when it comes to commercial cooking, and every cookie has to have the same amount of quality, even if thousands of cookies are being made.

On top of that, research is done to make sure that store-bought cookies are as good as possible, while also using different ingredients of different qualities. Shop-bought cookies are tried and tested, not just in flavour but also how cheap you can make them so you can sell them for profit.

Why not wing it?

The second reason is mostly my own fault. I don’t own a pair of scales, so I can’t accurately measure ingredients. Of course, I can make estimates and somewhat guess. Quantities can be somewhat guessed with some clever thinking, or by using cups as your unit of measurement. At least with cups, you can make somewhat accurate measurements. But not all recipes can easily converted into different measurements. So there’s always a little ambiguity when following a recipe.

Then, to make matters worse, I tend to completely wing it. I just throw together a bunch of stuff that cookies contain, add some smarties and throw them in the oven. While I do often manage to make a nice cookie, it’s never quite the same as a store-bought cookie.

There are more factors to making cookies.

But even when I do follow recipes to exact measurements, my cookies still don’t come out how I want them to. Because ingredients aren’t the only main component to a successful cookie. You also need to properly mix things, stir things and bake things. Even if I have all the ingredients properly measured, my oven is very different from everyone else’s oven. It’s also worth keeping in mind what your room temperature is, because my overly hot kitchen can easily reach 35C. But a standard room temperature is 25C.

It also depends on how you actually bake a cookie. A fan oven and a gas oven get hotter and cooler in different ways. Air fryers and similar products also cook in different ways. So when an oven says “8-10 minutes on 180C”, that’s just a rough guide. Ovens heat up at different speeds and this can make or break a cookie and how soft it is.

At the end of the day, there’s tons of cookie recipes out there, and tons of different factors. I just need to find the ones that work.