A Guide to Crispy, Cakey, and Small Batch Cookies

Crispy Cookies

Crispy cookies have crispy edges, but they can also have a soft and chewy center. They are the ones that are super delicious when dipped in milk.

I've outlined below a few specific ways that you can make those super crispy edges, like using melted butter and the pan-banging technique!

• Butter: Use some portion of melted butter. Melted butter helps the cookies to spread, resulting in a crispier cookie. It’s helpful to use half melted and half softened butter so that the cookies don’t spread too much. You can even cool the melted butter in the fridge or freezer before mixing it with the cookie dough.
• Granulated Sugar: Use a higher proportion of granulated sugar compared with brown sugar creates more spread and a crispier consistency.
• Reduce Baking Soda: For a thinner crispier cookie use less baking soda. That way the cookie does not puff up to the same degree.
• Pan Banging Technique: I use this technique to make both Crispy Chocolate Chip Cookies and Crispy Rice Krispie Cookies. To create crispy ripples in cookies, open the oven before the cookies are done baking, (about ⅔ of the way through the baking time) pick up the cookie sheet with oven mitts, and bang the sheet back down on the rack. This deflates the cookies and creates a ripple in the dough. Bake the cookies for 2 more minutes and repeat. I've found you can do this up to 3 times total.
  • This technique is also used for making brownies to make them extra fudgy, which Ina Garten has been doing since her early days of owning a shop called Barefoot Contessa in the Hamptons.
• Rice Krispies: Use Rice Krispies to add a little extra crunch with these Chocolate Chip Rice Krispie Cookies, or for an even crispier cookie combine Rice Krispies and the pan-banging technique for the ultimate Crispy Rice Krispie Cookies.
• With Salted Caramel: If you want to add salted caramel to your cookies and make them crispy, the trick is to freeze the cookies and bake from frozen, like in this recipe for Crispy Salted Caramel Cookies.

Cakey Cookies

Cakey Cookies are quite the opposite of chewy, soft cookies. They are softer, more cake-like, and can often be used to make sandwich cookies filled with cream cheese frosting, like these Gingerbread Whoopie Pies.

• Extra Egg: Adding an extra egg or egg white to the cookie dough helps to create extra cakey cookies.
• Limit Sugar: For a cake-textured cookie reduce the amount of sugar which helps cookies to be softer and spread less.
• Flour: Cakey cookies tend to have more flour than chewy cookies.
• Leavening: Cakey cookies have more leavening agents than typical cookies to help the cookies rise and give it that lighter texture.

Small Batch Cookies

Small Batch Cookies are not as easy to make as cutting a recipe in half. Sometimes a small batch recipe will require that you use only an egg yolk, rather than a whole egg.

In small batch recipes, the exact amount of each ingredient becomes critical to the success of the recipe. With less cookie dough there is less room for error.

• Egg Yolk: In developing several small-batch cookie recipes I’ve found that it's helpful to eliminate the egg white in many cases. The egg white yields a cakey consistency rather than a chewy one in small batches.
• Flour: Measuring flour according to the recipe is extra important in small-batch recipes because the total volume of dough is so small. Any small difference in any of the ingredients can have an oversized impact on how the cookie tastes.
• Mixing the Ingredients: Because there’s so little dough and ingredients to work with it's important that the ingredients are added one at a time and mixed evenly, which also means scraping down the bowl and spoon as you go.