There are few things more delicious than digging into a plate of freshly made cookies. The hot cookies — be they , peanut butter, or sugar cookies — taste great, evoke feelings of nostalgia, and just make you feel good. But if you love baking and you keep noticing your cookies aren't turning out perfectly, the answer to your problems could have something to do with your butter.
The key to baking — aside from following instructions — is patience, and using butter with cookies does requires patience. Butter is a key ingredient in any cookie recipe, but there's a big difference between using cold butter, melted butter, or softened butter in terms of what they do to the cookies. Knowing the difference can make a big difference between perfect cookies and lackluster treats.
Cold butter is frequently used in baking for items like pie crusts, but care must be taken when using it. When it's pulled from the fridge and added to a baking mix, it can result in thick, flaky, almost biscuit-like cookies. That's not necessarily the case with melted butter.
Since it's melted, it mixes well with sugar and flour to create thin, crispy cookies as melted butter tends to spread more. Stick with softened butter for your cookies To get Instagram-worthy cookies (either traditional or ), using softened butter at room temperature remains your best bet. For reference, room temperature butter is between 70 and 72 degrees — not soft enough yet to melt, but soft enough to take in air.
What you e.