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Everyone loves to eat cookies every once in a while. After all, they are a versatile dessert that can be made in a number of different ways.
From the thin and brittle cookies to the ones that are thick and chewy, there are countless textures and flavors that you can consider making when you are working with cookies.
Before you get to working with the flavor and the type of cookie you are making, however, you are going to have to think about the recipe and how well you work with cookie dough.
Cookie dough, as with many other baking projects, can be rather finicky at times. Even when you use the right ingredients, there will always be the chance that something can, and will, go wrong.
Nobody really wants to think about this happening, but it is always important for you to think about this possibility and be prepared for it.
One problem that you might run into is that your cookie dough ends up being too runny. This often happens because you added too much liquid, usually milk.
There are a few different routes that you can take to fixing this problem depending on what you have on-hand and how much extra liquid has been added.
The First Method: Doubling the Ingredients
The first method that you can consider using is the method that will produce the best results with the least amount of work. However, you will need to know how much extra liquid you added.
This method works best in a situation where you added two-thirds of a cup of milk rather than one-third of a cup of milk.
For this method, you will simply want to double the amount of the other ingredients added so that, proportionately, everything works out in the end. In a situation where you added more than double the amount of milk to your cookie dough, you will want to add the amount of ingredients proportional to that amount.
For example, if you added three times as much milk, then you would use triple the ingredients.
This method works by simply making the recipe larger, balancing out the amount of extra milk that has been added. While this is certainly the easiest way to fix the problem of having too much liquid in your cookie dough, it unfortunately only works when you have a good idea of how much extra liquid is in the cookie dough.
You can always take your chances and add the ingredients based on how much extra liquid you think there is, but then you run the risk of having too little milk in your dough.
The Second Method: Adding Flour
The second method you can consider is adding an ingredient that counteracts the amount of liquid in the cookie dough.
Even if you didn’t add double the amount of milk to the dough, runny dough is often caused by too much liquid. This means that using an ingredient that counteracts that liquid should make your cookie dough thicker than it currently is.
The best ingredient to use in this situation is going to be flour. It can be hard to determine just how much flour you will need to remedy the situation, especially if you are still new to baking.
With that being said, you can always add more flour if you need to. Fixing excess flour is far more difficult than putting flour into a dish.
This means that you will want to add the flour slowly, stirring it in and seeing if the amount that you put in has allowed the dough to reach the desired consistency. This may take a fair amount of time, but for good cookies, it will be well worth the wait.
While you are adding the extra flour, you will also want to add a small amount of sugar alongside it. Not only will this ensure that your cookie dough doesn’t taste too floury, but the chemical aspects of sugar will help out with the baking process when there is the right proportion of sugar.
You will always want to use significantly less sugar than you use flour when you are working with this method.
The Third Method: Using the Oven
This method is best used when you do not have the option of adding flour or sugar to your dough. It is the least effective method, and it takes a fair bit of time to deal with. In some sense, it can be considered a last resort because of how much time it can take.
It is also important to note that it can also affect the texture of your cookie dough slightly, meaning that you should take some caution before you use this method.
The way this method works is you use the oven to physically dry out the cookie dough, returning it to a state that it was before it became too runny. It takes a lot of time and there is the possibility of drying it out too much that you need to be aware of.
If you plan on using this method, you will want to first spread the mixture out a little bit before putting it in the oven so that it heats up more evenly. You will then want to cook the dough at a very low temperature to draw the moisture out.
You will also want to periodically stop the process to mix the dough up so that it heats evenly and doesn’t begin to cook.
There are a few risks to this, with the most important one being that you can accidentally begin cooking the dough. Doing this will impact the texture of your cookies immensely which is why this is often the last resort that you should take to thicken your cookie dough.
However, if you are desperate to achieve the perfect cookie dough texture and you want to remedy the runny cookie dough, then this may be the method that works best for you.
In the end, it is important to remember that each method should be used in moderation, or else you may end up with cookie dough that is too dry or too crumbly, causing the opposite problems for your cookies.
Always remember that it is much easier to add ingredients to a dish than to try and take them out.
