Welcome to Hotline Rewind, the weekly series where we gather up your questions from the week (and pepper in some from the Hotline archives) about a specific culinary topic. Because the holidays are officially here, we’re fully focused on the bite-sized, highly decorated world of cookies. We’ve received tons of questions over the years—and many in the last week!—about the intricacies of baking. Here are a few of the most common ones:
My cookies always spread! What am I doing wrong?
This almost always comes down to fat: if you’re doing a classic cookie recipe with creamed butter and sugar, it’s likely that you are either using butter that is too warm or borderline-melted, or you’re not chilling the dough. A lot of cookie recipes don’t require chilling, but I think almost every cookie would benefit from 10 to 20 minutes in the freezer pre-bake. Read More >>