A friend gave me a recipe for cranberry flavored cookies that taste good, but they aren’t of a ‘texture’ I like. As in, the cookies are softish little lumps after they’re cooked, tender and crumbly, somewhat like you’ve taken a bite of cake.
Me, I prefer my cookies to be either hard and crispy (e.g. ginger snaps) or thin but chewy (e.g., well, some sugar cookies or chocolate chip cookies.)
I’m thinking the main difference is in how much a cookie ‘spreads’ as it bakes, and likely the fats to solids ratio, and maybe whether the fat is oil or butter or margarine or crisco. (My favorite sugar cookie uses nothing but crisco.)
To cut down on how many failures I experience as I tinker, any rules of thumb? Like butter = crispier, margarine = chewier?
The current cookies swell up as they bake and hardly spread out at all – would just reducing the baking soda/powder lessen that? They also have two eggs, would cutting that to one make then less cakey? But increase some liquid amount to offset the loss in terms of how stiff the dough is?
Also … I really think I’d like them more if they were cranberry-ORANGE flavored cookies. I’m betting adding orange zest would be good for that, but maybe I should add orange juice instead, to replace the loss of liquid from the egg?