A Guide To Making The Best Homemade Cookies

This Guide to Making The Best Homemade Cookies gives you all the best tips and tricks for making cookies at home.

Cookies are some of the most satisfying and fun things to bake in the kitchen. They're quick and generally pretty easy with a sweet little reward for your efforts. But sometimes it's helpful to have a few tricks in your back pocket.

Below are my top three tips for making better cookies at home.

I've also included what tools are best and how to get those perfectly round cookies. Keep an eye out at the bottom for how to store, freeze, and refrigerate cookies and cookie dough.

Jump to:

• 🥄 1. Measuring Flour
• 🧈 2. Butter Temperature
• ☀️ 3. Oven Temperature & Baking Sheet
• 🔑 A Few Other Key Tips
• ❄️ Refrigerating, Freezing, and Storing
• For More Information on Baking, See These Helpful Guides:

🥄 1. Measuring Flour

There is no standard in the US for how to measure flour, or precisely how many grams are in a cup of flour. To ensure that your cookies come out as the recipe intended it's important to measure the flour as the recipe developer intended (which is not always clear from the recipe).

If a room full of people were to measure 1 cup of flour, results would likely vary anywhere from 120 grams to 150 grams. That’s a very wide range, and when it comes to cookies, it makes a huge difference in how chewy and soft or dense and dry the outcome.

Oftentimes recipes indicate that you should add the flour to the measuring cup one spoonful at a time, then level the cup with the flat edge of a knife. This will get you very close to 120 grams, which is the standard used by King Arthur Flour and Nestlé for their famous Toll House cookie recipe (I called Nestlé to verify).

But many home bakers will dunk a measuring cup into a bag of flour and level what they scoop out. This is closer to a weight of 140-150 grams. When I write recipes, I err on the side of 140 grams to more closely align with what I believe many home bakers are already doing, but whenever possible it is helpful to check with the specific recipe.

For reference, an article from the L.A. Times lists different standards of weight measurement for 1 cup of flour at a number of large companies:

• King Arthur Flour: 120 grams
• Bake From Scratch: 125 grams
• Washington Post: 126 grams
• The New York Times: 128 grams (though some of its recipe developers use different weights)
• Bon Appetit: 130 grams
• AllRecipes.com: 136 grams
• The L.A. Times & Cooks Illustrated: 142 grams

🧈 2. Butter Temperature

Butter temperature is key to getting drop cookies that are the right consistency. Too cold and the butter won’t blend well into the batter, too warm and the cookies will spread and become puddles.

I do find, however, that there is a range of butter temperature that works well in most drop cookies. As long as it is soft, but not melty or totally give way when you press on it, you’ll likely have a good result.

The nice thing is that if your butter is too soft, you can chill it or the cookie dough in the fridge. Or if it’s too cold, you can let it sit longer on the counter to warm up, or even microwave the butter at a low power level until it has softened.

Keep in mind that if you want to microwave the butter, the dish that it is on and how much heat it absorbs will change the amount of time that you need to microwave it on low power. Start with 30 seconds at 20% power and flip the butter over in between microwaving. Adjust from there as needed.

☀️ 3. Oven Temperature & Baking Sheet

Oven Temperature: Oven temperatures can vary widely, and therefore your baking time may differ from what a recipe indicates. Setting an oven to 350°F does not necessarily mean that the oven will actually preheat to 350°F. Some ovens run cooler or hotter, or have hot spots in the oven.

I’ve baked in different ovens all across the country as well as in Europe, and they are certainly not all created equal. You can buy an oven thermometer that sits in the oven to verify the temperature, or otherwise, just keep this understanding in mind. You may need to shorten or extend the baking time based on your oven’s settings.

Baking Sheet: Using a poor-quality baking sheet will more often lead to cookies that aren’t quite right. They may be undercooked in the middle yet burned on the bottom, or spread more or less than intended. Baking sheets that are nonstick or dark in color will brown cookies much more quickly.  If you’re curious, the site Handle the Heat has done testing with several different baking sheets.

I’ve used several different heavy gauge half sheet pans for baking cookies all with good results, but my favorite is the Williams Sonoma Traditionaltouch Corrugated Half Sheet Pan. It has held up well for many years and does not have any nonstick coating.

🔑 A Few Other Key Tips

• Fully Preheat the Oven: Allow the oven to fully preheat before baking cookies. Aim for the oven to be on for an additional 10-20 minutes after it has indicated that it has preheated.
• One Batch at a Time: Place the rack in the center of the oven and bake only 1 sheet of cookies at a time.
• Test Cookies: It’s always helpful to bake one cookie first as a test to ensure that the timing and the amount of flour is right, especially when trying a new recipe.
• Don’t Overmix: To prevent tough cookies, do not overmix the batter once the wet and dry ingredients have been combined. Mixing the batter develops gluten which creates tougher (think chewy like pizza crust), rather than tender (sink your teeth into) cookies.
• Shaping Drop Cookies: A technique often called the “cookie scoot” can help shape cookies into perfectly neat and round circles after they come out of the oven. To do so, put a glass upside down over a cookie and circle it around the cookie smoothing the cookie’s edges. I’m not a big fan of this technique (but it’s still fun to try). I prefer the less perfectly shaped cookies that look homemade rather than mass produced. Rolling the dough into a round ball between the palms of your hands before baking also achieves a more symmetrical look and one that I do use from time to time.
• Ice Cream Scoop: Ice cream scoops can be helpful for scooping cookie dough onto a cookie sheet. They can give you a precise amount, and can be a little less messy than using spoons or your hands. However, I err on the side of not using an ice cream scoop because it gives the cookie a ribbed top like you’d see on a classic scoop of ice cream.
• Cheese Slicer (Spatula): I recommend using a metal cheese slicer as a spatula to remove cookies from a baking sheet. It is smaller than a standard spatula, it tends to have a thin front edge, and it is slightly angled making it much easier to remove cookies from a baking sheet without messing up other cookies in the process.

❄️ Refrigerating, Freezing, and Storing

Refrigerating Dough: If left to sit the flour in the cookie dough will start to absorb some of the liquid ingredients (hydrate). The flavors meld and taste better when baked the next day. This is the equivalent of a lasagna that tastes better on Day 2. While extra tasty (it helps a ton with these Café Chocolate Chip Cookies), it's not always necessary. A good cookie is a good cookie, and it may just not be worth the extra time or planning ahead. Other times it is important to get the right consistency, so be mindful of the recipe instructions.

Refrigerating the dough also helps if the ingredients have gotten too soft. Stick the dough in the fridge for 30 min to 1 hour to help shape the dough. This helps to prevent cookies that spread too thin or are so soft that they’re hard to scoop onto a baking sheet.

Freezing: Most types of cookie dough, especially drop cookie dough, can be frozen. This can be done either before or after shaping the cookies into individual balls of dough. But a little work now rolling the dough into balls saves lots of work later when you’re ready to bake (shaping before freezing is like a little gift to your future self).

Fully baked cookies can also be frozen with success, but there’s nothing much better than a cookie straight out of the oven. So I recommend freezing the dough, then baking the cookies day of if at all possible.

Storing: Cookies can usually be stored in an airtight container at room temperature for anywhere between 2-5 days. If the cookies are a bit crumbly after a few days, microwave them for a few seconds to soften them up.

For More Information on Baking, See These Helpful Guides: