Bake Cookies Day

What the day is

Bake Cookies Day is observed on December 18, in the week when most household baking of the year happens anyway.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented. The word has a clearer history: cookie comes from the Dutch for little cake and entered American English through the Dutch settlement of New York, which is why Americans bake cookies while the British bake biscuits, from a Latin phrase meaning twice cooked.

The useful material here is not a recipe but the small number of variables that decide how a cookie turns out.

Butter temperature governs spread. Creaming cold butter with sugar beats air into the dough and produces a taller, cakier cookie. Melted butter gives up that structure and produces a flatter, chewier one. Neither is a mistake, but they are different outcomes from otherwise identical ingredients.

Sugar decides texture. Brown sugar holds moisture and stays soft, so cookies made with it are chewy and darker. White sugar produces crisper edges and a paler cookie. Adjusting the ratio between them moves the result without touching anything else.

Leavening changes browning as well as lift. Baking soda raises the pH of the dough, which accelerates browning reactions and encourages spread. Baking powder gives more lift and a paler, more cake-like crumb.

The last variable is time. Resting the dough in the fridge for a day or two lets the flour hydrate fully and allows enzymes to break some starch into simpler sugars, which deepens both color and flavor noticeably. It is the single change most likely to improve a recipe you already like, and it costs nothing but patience.

How to take part

• Make the dough today and bake it tomorrow. The difference is larger than it sounds.
• Weigh the flour rather than scooping it. Scooping routinely adds a great deal more than intended.
• Pull them out looking slightly underdone. They finish setting on the hot tray.
• Change one variable at a time so you learn what each one does.
• Bake with somebody else. This is the one day of the year it is easy to arrange.