The Easy Way To Tell When Your Homemade Cookie Mixture Is Properly Creamed

Whichever is your favorite of the best cookie recipes out there, there is nothing better than pulling those sweet treats out of the oven and enjoying their warm goodness with friends and family. Of course, that can fall flat if your cookies turn out, well, flat, or just not quite right. This can be frustrating, especially if you think you did everything right. We know the feeling, so we turned to an expert for help. What's likely going wrong, and how do we fix it?

Anna Gordon, founder of New York City's The Good Batch, told us 19 ways to elevate our homemade cookies and pointed out that one of the most common mistakes is not "creaming" correctly. Creaming is the process of combining the butter and sugar for the dough. If you under-whip these two ingredients, you can get shapeless cookies; over-whipping yields flat cookies. So, how can you avoid this? There's  foolproof way to tell when you've hit the perfect level of whipping.

"[Mix] it until it's like light yellow," Gordon says. "That's the perfect place to stop." When you can see the shape of the butter in the cream that's forming, that's still not whipped enough. But if the mixture is becoming white, that's whipped too much. Light yellow means the butter and sugar are well incorporated but not overly mixed. If you're using a mixer, this will likely take about five minutes, or a bit longer by hand. 

Creaming is a critical step of the recipe because this is how you get air into your dough. As the butter and sugar are whipped around and hit the bowl, the sugar crystals create holes in the butter that trap air in the butter's fat structure. That is what will give your dough more volume as well as a light texture and formed shape. So, if you end up with flat or shapeless cookies, you can safely assume that on your next bake, you should pay closer attention to your whipping.

This is one of the most important expert tips for baking better cookies, and it's closely related to another, which is using ingredients at room temperature. Your butter should be soft — not hard and not melted. Trying to beat it with the sugar right out of the fridge is difficult, and you might have over-whipped by the time that hard butter has incorporated into the sugar. But if you microwave it to get it soft quickly, that melted butter can't trap air, and you'll get a heavy, flat, oily dough. Remember to get the butter out on your counter about 30 minutes before you're going to bake. If it gives a bit when you press it, it's ready to be perfectly whipped.