The Baking Answer Book (22 page)

A
First, check the expiration date on your baking powder. If it’s been sitting in the pantry since the Clinton Administration, go out and buy a fresh supply.

If your biscuit cutter, chef’s knife, or pizza cutter isn’t sharp, or you are not cutting cleanly and incisively, your cutter’s edge may be compressing your dough layers at the edges, causing them to stick together so they are unable to separate into flaky layers and rise high in the oven.

Sometimes a recipe will instruct you to glaze the tops of your scones with a beaten egg to give the scones a shiny finish. Be careful, as you would when working with puff pastry (see
page 285
), to brush just the tops, and not the sides of the scones. An egg wash on the sides of cut scones will dry out quickly in the oven, holding the dough back from rising to its potential height.

Q
How do I tell when my biscuits and scones are done baking?

A
Because these items are relatively small and bake at such a high temperature, the difference between baking them to perfection and overbaking them so that they are
dry and hard is a matter of a minute or two. Don’t overbake them. Chances are, if they are golden brown on the outside they will be dried out on the inside. As soon as your biscuits and scones are well-risen and just beginning to color, remove them from the oven. Let them cool on the baking sheet for 5 minutes, during which time they will continue to firm up inside from residual heat.

Q
Can freshly baked biscuits and scones be frozen and reheated?

A
Biscuits are best eaten fresh from the oven, and are so quick to make that you can have them on the table in less than 30 minutes from the time you start gathering your ingredients, if you are efficient and skilled. If at all possible, mix a fresh batch of biscuit dough when you need it.

Leftover biscuits may be frozen in a resealable plastic bag. Defrost them on the countertop and reheat them for a minute or two in a 500°F (260°C) oven, which will refresh them but won’t restore 100 percent of their just-baked goodness. If you know you can’t possibly eat all of the biscuits you are cutting, I suggest you freeze the unbaked biscuits, rather than bake and then freeze. You can bake these straight from the freezer, adding a minute or two onto your recipe’s baking time, and the biscuits will taste as if you mixed the batter up that day.

CHAPTER 6
Cookies

Just because cookies are less fancy than layer cakes and require fewer steps than baking sourdough bread doesn’t mean that they are undeserving of the kind of care you’d take with these bigger baking projects. Any cookie worth making is worth making well. In this chapter I aim to answer the questions you might have about making the best possible cookies.

COOKIE CATEGORIES

Here is a breakdown of the different types of cookies, from kid-simple bars to what you may have thought of as pastry chef degree–required meringues and macaroons.

Drop cookies.
All in all the simplest variety, drop cookies are so called because to form them you simply drop balls of dough onto a baking sheet.

Hand-formed cookies.
Instead of dropping the dough, you’ll roll it or otherwise form it into balls, crescents, and other shapes, sometimes crosshatching with a fork (as with classic peanut butter cookies), sometimes leaving an impression in the center with your thumb, later to be filled with jelly or chocolate ganache. This category also includes more exotic varieties such as French tuiles and Italian biscotti.

Bar cookies
. Many recipes for bar cookies, including brownies and blondies, require nothing more than mixing dough and spreading it across the bottom of a baking pan. But the bar cookie category includes many layered treats, which take a bit more work. Lemon bars have a pastry crust topped with a lemon custard topping. Pecan bars have a pastry crust with a caramel and nut topping.

Rolled cookies.
You’ll need a rolling pin and a sharp paring knife or cookie cutters to make rolled cookies, including rolled sugar cookies and gingerbread men.

Icebox or slice-and-bake cookies.
To make these cookies, you shape dough into logs, refrigerate or freeze the logs, and then slice off rounds for baking.

Piped and molded cookies.
These include spritz cookies, which are pressed out of a cookie gun; a variety of cookies (such as madeleines) baked in molds; and cookies such as ladyfingers, macaroons, and meringues, which are shaped by piping batter through a pastry bag.

Filled cookies
. Cookie dough can be spread with filling and rolled up (rugelach are a good example) or sandwiched with filling (whoopee pies).

Q
Are there rules of thumb common to all types of cookie baking?

A
Making cookies is so familiar to most people that the idea of it rarely induces anxiety. But don’t get too relaxed — it’s important to follow certain rules, most of them common to all types of baking, for guaranteed success.

Cookie Rules

Preheat the oven.
It’s especially important when baking small items like cookies that the oven be up to temperature when baking begins.

Gather and measure your ingredients carefully.
Cookies may seem more casual and improvisational than cakes or breads, but the same scientific principles and chemical formulas that govern cake-baking and bread-baking apply to cookies. A few tablespoons of extra flour or the careless substitution of baking powder or baking soda will affect the final product. Learn what “packed” brown sugar means, master the dip-and-sweep method of measuring flour, and you will be fine.

Handle the ingredients properly.
If the recipe tells you to chop nuts coarsely, don’t chop them finely. Sifting cocoa powder is a pain, but if the recipe specifies it, there is probably a good reason. Unless otherwise specified, liquid ingredients like milk and eggs should be at room temperature. If the recipe calls for softened butter, don’t try to get away with ice-cold butter.

Take care to leave as much space as directed between cookies on the baking sheet.
If you don’t leave enough space between cookies (2 inches is usually enough, but sometimes you’ll need more), you can wind up with one big cookie in the end. Also be careful to make the cookies equal in size. When small items like these vary by even a teaspoon or two, baking time is dramatically affected. You don’t want your smallish cookies to overbake before your larger ones are done.