Gooey Butter Cookies Recipe - The Cookie Rookie® (2024)

FAQs

What is the secret to gooey cookies? ›

Cornstarch helps product soft and thick cookies. Using more brown sugar than white sugar results in a moister, softer cookie. An extra egg yolk increases chewiness.

Cookies made with melted butter often deflate and become denser when they cool, resulting in a perfectly cooked fudgy center — a similar textural result to brownies that get rapped (aka banged against an oven rack mid-bake to deflate them) or Sarah Kieffer's iconic pan-banging cookies that turn out pleasantly compact.

Chill the ingredients: This is especially important for the butter or margarine, which should be cold but not hard. Cold ingredients make the dough come together easier and be less sticky. Use Shortening: Substitute all or a portion of the butter or margarine in the recipe with shortening.

Under-creamed butter and sugar looks darker in color, with a visible heavy and gritty texture from the unincorporated sugar. It doesn't allow enough air to become incorporated into your batter or dough. This can lead to a heavy cake that doesn't properly rise or dense cookies.

Light corn syrup is another ingredient that you can add to cookie dough that will help it stay softer longer. The corn syrup you buy at the grocery store is not the high-fructose corn syrup that soft drinks are made with; it's a sugar that is liquid at room temperature and helps other sugars say liquid at high heat.

Cookie chemistry: We're taking a 180° turn from our crunchy cookies, substituting higher-moisture brown sugar and butter for their lower-moisture counterparts: granulated sugar and vegetable shortening. That, plus a shortened baking time, yields a cookie that's soft and chewy all the way through.

If you're looking for chewiness and bend, bread flour could be a handy addition to your cookie recipes. Fun fact: Alton Brown even named his signature bread flour Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe “The Chewy." Baker's tip: Looking for another way to add a little extra chew? Use brown sugar in your cookie dough.

Baking soda is typically used for chewy cookies, while baking powder is generally used for light and airy cookies. Since baking powder is comprised of a number of ingredients (baking soda, cream of tartar, cornstarch, etc.), using it instead of pure baking soda will affect the taste of your cookies.

King Arthur Flour says the purpose of the vinegar is to temper the sweetness of the sugar and it also reacts with the baking soda to allow the cookies to rise a bit more in the oven. Who knew, eh? So try it–you'll be surprised how it perfectly balances the taste.

If you don't have cornstarch on hand, there are a few alternative steps you can take to produce the cookie of your dreams. Go heavy on brown sugar. It has more moisture than its granulated counterpart, which means the cookie comes out less crispy. Unsurprisingly, more liquid retention guarantees a softer bite.

What happens if too much butter is in cookies? ›

Too much butter makes cookies turn out just as you'd expect: very buttery. This batch of cookies was cakey in the middle, but also airy throughout, with crispy edges. They were yellow and slightly puffy in the middle, and brown and super thin around the perimeter.

The lower the sugar, the less cookies spread, the drier/more crumbly they are. Cookies with less sugar taste less sweet, of course. But beyond that, their flavor also becomes flat; sugar is a flavor enhancer much like salt is.

The butter is "creamed" when it has almost doubled in mass and it has lightened to a yellowish-white color. Keep mixing on medium speed until the mix starts forming little peak-like ridges.

In the bowl of a stand mixer, or using an electric hand mixer, beat the butter and sugar together on medium speed until light and fluffy. Scrape down the sides with a spatula and continue beating. This process typically takes anywhere from 2-5 minutes.

Salted butter, softened – I prefer salted butter but you can also use unsalted and add an extra pinch of salt to the dough. Brown sugar – Just brown sugar because we will get the 'granulated sugar' flavor from the corn syrup. Corn syrup – The corn syrup is what makes these cookies CHEWY FOR DAYS.

Eggs, particularly egg yolks. Eggs work to make your cookies soft in two ways: They add a ton of moisture, and the proteins add structure that prevents spreading. Cake flour instead of all-purpose flour. Low in protein and high in moisture, cake flour is used to leaven all sorts of baked goods.

Cold Butter – taking your butter straight from the fridge and cubing it before adding it to the mixing bowl helps the cookies stay thick and not spread while baking. Cornstarch – the cornstarch added to the dough helps the cookies be thick but not dry.

1. Cookies. Cornstarch does kind of incredible things to cookies. I mean not only does it give them soft centers, prevents them from spreading, and makes them somewhat thick (in a good way), but it also contributes to the chewiness factor, which, in my opinion, is the most important cookie attribute.