6 Reasons Why Your Cookies are Spreading (2024)

FAQs

6 Reasons Why Your Cookies are Spreading? ›

By using warm cookie dough, you can encourage faster spreading and ensure that your cookies have a soft, chewy texture with a thin, crispy edge. Using warm dough is not a suggestion you will hear too often, as one of the core tenets of baking cookies with chilled dough.

By using warm cookie dough, you can encourage faster spreading and ensure that your cookies have a soft, chewy texture with a thin, crispy edge. Using warm dough is not a suggestion you will hear too often, as one of the core tenets of baking cookies with chilled dough.

Chilling your cookie dough is the single biggest piece of advice I give people to stop their sugar cookies spreading too much. By allowing your cookie dough to chill and rest in the fridge for between 24-72 hours allows the fat in your cookies, to solidify.

Take, for instance, the cookie's diameter. Its size depends on how quickly the dough spreads out as the butter melts in the oven. If you start off with melted butter in the raw dough — instead of cold butter chunks — the dough is immediately wetter and will spread out faster. The result is a flatter, wider cookie.

Excess Sugar and Fat

If your cookie contains excess sugar or fat, it will spread while baking. If your first batch of cookies spreads, try adding a few tablespoons of flour to help thicken the remaining dough.

I personally would try fridge but for longer. If you bake directly from frozen, that will likely cause the exterior part of the cookie to thaw and spread more quickly than the interior, potentially leaving you with an underdone center. But just experiment with both and see what happens!

Cookies. Cornstarch does kind of incredible things to cookies. I mean not only does it give them soft centers, prevents them from spreading, and makes them somewhat thick (in a good way), but it also contributes to the chewiness factor, which, in my opinion, is the most important cookie attribute.

Place each portion onto a piece of lightly floured parchment paper or a lightly floured silicone baking mat. With a lightly floured rolling pin, roll the dough out to about 1/4-inch thickness. Use more flour if the dough seems too sticky. The rolled-out dough can be any shape, as long as it is evenly 1/4-inch thick.

Butter, on the other hand, melts quickly, so the same recipe made with butter spreads faster and farther. Because cookies made with butter tend to spread more, the cookies are often thin and crisper. All types of fat—margarine, shortening, and butter—are tenderizers.

Just like in the laboratory, even the seemingly smallest changes can affect the outcome — oven temperature variations, moisture and even the order in which you add the ingredients are just a few of the factors that can affect texture and taste. And while some may love a soft cookie, others prefer a crispier variation.

Should cookie dough be wet? ›

When cookie dough is too wet, your cookies may come out too thin and crispy, too dense, or just plain bad. However, this problem is easily fixed if you know how. To fix a cookie dough that's too wet, add in some more flour one tablespoon at a time. This should help absorb any extra moisture lingering in your dough.

Baking soda also serves another important purpose when it comes to cookies: It encourages spreading by raising the mixture's pH, which slows protein coagulation. This gives the dough more time to set before the eggs set, which results in a more evenly baked cookie.

Of course, you can always flatten your butter cookies to make them crispier if you like them that way. Margarine cookies, on the other hand, will be thinner and more spread out compared to butter cookies baked with the same ingredient ratios.

OVEN IS TOO HOT

If your cookies consistently come out flat, you may have selected the wrong baking temperature. If you bake cookies using too much heat, the fats in the dough begin to melt before the other ingredients can cook together and form your cookie's rise.