Gooey Butter Cookies Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What does extra butter do to cookies? ›

Want to know what makes chocolate chip cookies even better? More butter, of course! The extra butter in these cookies makes them super tender. Everyone will wonder about your “secret ingredient,” but only you'll know the reason for the popularity of your easy chocolate chip cookies.

Made of little else but flour, sugar, butter, eggs, and corn syrup, it's immediately satisfying and luxurious to eat. The result is chewy, rich, and creamy, almost like a vanilla pudding that's been nestled into a blondie. In St. Louis gooey butter cake is everywhere.

Shortening traps more air bubbles and has a higher melting point than butter, so recipes using shortening tend to produce baked goods with more lift and that hold their shape during baking. Interior texture will also be softer and lighter.

The butter cookie originates from Denmark. Unlike a sugar cookie that is often rolled out flat and cut with a cookie cutter, a butter cookie is softer and for the best results is piped directly onto a baking sheet then baked. The result is a crisp cookie with a more decorative 'whipped' appearance.

Cookies made with melted butter often deflate and become denser when they cool, resulting in a perfectly cooked fudgy center — a similar textural result to brownies that get rapped (aka banged against an oven rack mid-bake to deflate them) or Sarah Kieffer's iconic pan-banging cookies that turn out pleasantly compact.

Gooey butter cake is a type of cake traditionally made in St. Louis, Missouri.

Often, butter has salt and air added to it as well. As you melted the butter, the emulsion separates. The yellow liquid is the fat. The solid, white stuff is the milk proteins.

To store: Store gooey butter cake covered, at room temperature, for 3-4 days or in the refrigerator for up to 1 week. To freeze: Allow the cake to cool to room temperature and then decide on a freezing method. I like to cut gooey butter cake into smaller bars and place them in a gallon freezer ziplock bag.

“Cornstarch is a game changer for cookie baking,” confirms Brian Hart Hoffman, editor in chief of Bake from Scratch. “You can count on [it for] a softer and more tender crumb.”

What happens if you use Crisco instead of butter in cookies? ›

Basically, cookies made with butter spread more and are flatter and crisper if baked long enough. However, they are more flavorful than cookies made with shortening. Cookies made with shortening bake up taller and are more tender, but aren't as flavorful.

Sometimes it's a flavor enhancer and sometimes it's a flavor balancer. But to be honest, unless it's a vanilla cookie, it's not a true dealbreaker. Especially if you're making cookies that have lots of other flavors going on, like coconut or dark chocolate.

All-Purpose Flour: The Versatile Choice

This balanced protein level makes it versatile enough to produce both soft and chewy cookies as well as slightly crisp ones. If you're looking for a safe bet or are new to cookie baking, all-purpose flour is your go-to option.

Too much butter makes cookies turn out just as you'd expect: very buttery. This batch of cookies was cakey in the middle, but also airy throughout, with crispy edges. They were yellow and slightly puffy in the middle, and brown and super thin around the perimeter.

Butter doesn't affect just the flavour of your cookies, it has a major impact on their texture and structure, too. When you cream butter and sugar together, you incorporate air into the batter, which will leaven the cookies as they bake, leading to cakier, fluffier cookies.

It's the ratios and temperature of those ingredients that make this recipe stand out from the rest. Melted butter: Melted butter produces the chewiest cookies. It can, however, make your baked cookies greasy, so I made sure there is enough flour to counteract that.

If your cookies repeatedly turn out flat, no matter the recipe, chances are your oven is too hot. Here's what's happening. The butter melts super quickly in a too-hot oven before the other ingredients have firmed up into a cookie structure. Therefore, as the butter spreads so does the whole liquidy cookie.