Hey everybody,
Back for the first time in a while with a brand new Substack! I hope everyone has been well. I’ve already spectacularly failed at my “two pieces of content per month” resolution–a yearly tradition at this point–but am holding fast on some other resolutions regarding fitness and productivity. There was one goal that I set out with in the new year, however, that has been a maddening struggle, and that goal is the subject of today’s post. That goal has to do with cookies–specifically, chocolate chip cookies, and specifically, the ability to make them without them spreading like sixth grade gossip (spreading joke #1).
For the blessedly unfamiliar, “spreading” is the phenomenon whereby the fat fails to incorporate properly in your cookie and melts too quickly in the oven, causing the cookies to spread out into a chewy tray of bullshit rather than the circles of plump unctuousness you’re probably already fantasizing about as you read this. Now, to establish a bit of ethos here, I am not a bad baker. I’m by no means an expert, but I’ve baked a fair amount since taking up the hobby more seriously in 2021, and I’ve made cakes and pies and breads and pastries that have all turned out just fine, and on a few occasions pretty darn good. But cookies, arguably the most basic of the baking staples, have always failed me, or rather I’ve always failed them. Every time I’ve tried to make cookies from scratch in the last few years, they’ve always spread like a deli owner’s exaggeration (#2) and ranged from borderline inedible to abjectly embarrassing. So, rather than shy away from failure and decide that I was never going to improve, a deep tendency I try to resist, I delved deep into cookie research, and as near as I could find, the likeliest cause of my spreading issue was improper creaming of the butter and sugar. Do you know how to cream butter, reader? My fucking ass you do. You only THINK you do. Let me enlighten you.
Creaming butter is the process whereby you whip softened butter to an airy consistency. According to google and the butter scientists at Land o Lakes, perfectly creamed butter should have a pale yellow color and a light, fluffy consistency, which should take about 1-3 minutes on medium speed with a mixer. Sounds simple enough right? WRONG! You IDIOT! What does “softened” mean? What is medium on a mixer? Does it vary between mixers? Pale yellow? Fluffy? ONE TO THREE MINUTES!?!?
Needless to say, after fifteen failed batches of chocolate chip cookies where I followed these instructions to the letter, I began to question my sanity. Allow me to take you through the process of my final bake before deciding I was in the Twilight Zone.
First, I took my butter out of the fridge. I’ll save you the trouble of hours of research and let you know that “softened” or “room temperature” butter is considered to be about 67 degrees fahrenheit (give or take a degree depending on the source) and should still feel firm to the touch. I say hours of research because even though the above information is from a two second google search, it consistently failed to work, and there are about a thousand baking blogs with slight variations on multiple tips to remedy the situation. So, for my final bake, I tried every failsafe I could find. I took my butter out, left it in the coolest spot in our kitchen for half an hour, felt it, examined the sticks for grease, temped it with a kitchen thermometer designed to make sure chicken doesn’t kill me rather than to execute a five year old’s favorite food, and creamed it for two and a half minutes with the sugar until it was pale yellow and fluffy if those words have any objective meaning. If Moses came down from Sinai with a tablet that said I didn’t cream this butter right, I’d have told him to turn the fuck around and go back up and ask God again. Sure enough, I incorporated my dry ingredients, chilled my dough in the fridge before baking (just as double indemnity against butter failure), threw my cookies in the oven and prayed. Twelve to fifteen minutes later, I looked inside and my heart just broke. I now had a choice: try something that went against most conventional wisdom, or resign myself to hopelessness. It’s the lowest-stakes iteration of that choice that anyone has ever had.
I’m like you. I love cookies and I don’t like being bad at stuff. So I decided to try one more time, and this time I decided to bake from my heart. So, using the same recipe I’d seen spread like Skeet Ulrich referencing Sharon Stone in Scream (#3?), I set out to bake one more batch. But this time, instead of creaming the butter at all, I melted it and browned it, because I love the flavor of brown butter. I didn’t even wait for it to cool very much before I mixed everything else together (just enough so that it wouldn’t cook the egg), nor did I chill the dough at all between mixing it and baking it. I just balled those bastards up and threw them in the oven. It sounded insane. After all, the butter melting too quickly was what had doomed every other batch, and this time I started with melted butter. But wouldn’t you know it, 12-15 minutes later, I had perfect, gorgeous, circular pillows of cookie goodness on my hands. They held their height cooling and tasted like heaven. So this substack has a happy ending, and a long way of getting back to its point:
Don’t ever give up!* If you ever really wanna do something** just keep at it and eventually you’ll find a way to succeed! Even if it means going against everyone***, stay true to yourself****!
Thanks to everyone who stuck it out, and if this gets five likes I’ll drop the recipe in the comments!
*Unless the thing you’re trying to do hurts people, or the trying hurts yourself more than you can bear.
**As long as it’s something objectively good and/or harmless like cookies, and not, like, arson or something.
***Unless the thing involves doctors or rocket engineers or something, in which case it’s very likely that deferring to their expertise is the best course of action.
****Unless you suck, in which case, get better! It’s possible! We all suck to an extent, but we can choose that extent!