Bakeline Crew Offers Some Guidelines For Cookie Baking

The bulk of holiday baking questions the Land O’ Lakes Holiday Bakeline (1-800-782-9606) has fielded over the past six years have been about cookies.

Here’s some tips from the Bakeline crew:

Ideal baking temperature is 350 degrees.

Measure flour properly. Spoon it into a measuring cup and level it off with a knife.

Be careful with butter consistency. For cookies, butter should not be too soft or melted; otherwise, cookies will spread. Julia Child’s suggestion is to take cold butter and give it a whack with a rolling pin.

Unsalted and salted butter may be used interchangeably. Salt should not be added when using salted butter.

Chill cookie dough between batches. If it gets too soft, cookies will spread too much. Always put cookie dough on a cold baking sheet or cookies will spread too much.

Test baked goods for doneness. For cookies, rely on time and look of cookie. For pies, rely on time, color and consistency of one-crust pies. For bars and cakes, rely on testing with a toothpick. But know what you’re testing for. Some items such as cakes should be nearly dry, but some bars - especially brownies - should be still quite moist.

Cool baked items on a rack. The object is to stop the cooking; a rack draws off some of the pan’s heat and allows air to circulate underneath, which hastens cooling.

Understand your pie plates. A glass plate makes the flakiest crust; dark pans make crisp crusts, not too flaky; shiny metal pans tend to produce soggy crusts.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Jan Ellen Spiegel Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph