Cooking tips, tricks, and advice from professional kitchens
Posts tagged cookie
Spacing cookies in an interlocking pattern
Jul 11th
Placing items such as cookies or scones on a baking tray in an interlocking pattern can enable you to bake more at a time, and with a more evenly shaped result. As the cookies spread, if not interlocked, they may spread into each other leaving you with blob shaped cookies. Interlocking makes the best use of the space on the cookie sheet so you can fit the maximum number of cookies on the tray and still have then be nice and round.
Shortbread tips
Nov 21st
Tip 1. When rolling out the shortbread, or any type of cookie for that matter, to ensure an even thickness across whatever you’re rolling, it’s helpful to have 2 strips (say like an old wooden board) of whatever thickness you want your cookies to be. Place the boards on either side of the dough and roll onto them. This will ensure that you get exactaly the same thickeness no matter how many pieces of dough you roll, and that the dough won’t get thinner at the edges where more pressure is applied. If this is something you make a lot, you can even mark the size of your cookies onto the planks and cut using those guidelines.
2. If you want to sugar your shortbread. There are 2 options both with their own pros and cons. You can lightly brush the surfaces with an egg white and then dust them with sugar. This method uses the additional materials of an egg white, which if you’re in a commercial setting is no problem, but at home it can be more of a hassle than it’s worth. So, another method is to dust the cookies with sugar straight after they’ve come out of the oven. This only coats the top surface, but it doesn’t require any extra materials.
