Soften Butter Or Melt Butter For Cookies

Part of the “What if” series. Question: What if we soften butter or melt butter for cookies? What will happen to the cookies?

Baking is a work of art. Sometimes it turns out beautifully. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it looks like picture Pinterest perfection and sometimes, well, it doesn’t.

My sad cake that did not turn out of the pan correctly. 🙁

Do you know what happens when you don’t use butter correctly in baking cookies? You get sad cookies.

Cooking is a lot of fun, as you don’t have to measure everything accurately. You can add a little more broth here or garlic there. Perfect for someone like me (ahem!) because I typically dump the ingredients in the pan and eye the measurements.

Baking is not that way.

[Tweet “You can not just throw ingredients in a bowl and expect cookies to appear”]

Baking requires measuring, somewhat precision. Okay, very precision. Which is why I am so liberal with the cinnamon. You can’t ruin a recipe with cinnamon. Most of the time.

Baking is more complicated because if you add sugar, flour and eggs, but no baking powder, you aren’t going to get good pancakes. If you add chocolate chips, oil and pumpkin, the bread isn’t going to turn out right.

Same with butter. Now, butter is in many recipes and we can certainly have a discussion on butter vs. margarine. We aren’t going to, just use your favorite butter (margarine) of choice for your recipes. Whichever works for the recipe and for you.

Now when you go to soften that butter, how many of us simply sticks it into the microwave to soften it?

Yes, I do that too.

I’m sure you have found out, it just doesn’t work that way.

Or in our case, wrapper. My problem with the softened butter part of the recipe, is I never plan ahead enough to have the butter sitting on the counter to soften. I usually head to the kitchen to bake those cookies. I have then thrown the butter in the microwave to “soften” it, aka: melt it.

This is the result of melted butter in a cookie.

The cookies are flat and thin. They spread way too wide. They are still quite tasty, just doesn’t look all that great. Has this every happened to your cookies? What to do, what to do?

:: Plan ahead

Walk by your fridge and pull out the butter and lay it on the counter. Then come back in a 1/2 hour. {This is for all of you who are planners. Good for you!} 🙂

:: Microwave it

Just soften the butter in the microwave, don’t melt it. I put mine in for about 15 seconds. That seems to be the perfect amount of time for the butter to soften a little, yet not melt.