Melt in your mouth orange vanilla cookies recipe (2024)

FAQs

Why do my homemade cookies taste like flour? ›

Improper flour measurement is the #1 cause of your cookie dough being too dry or the cookies tasting like flour.

The job of butter in baking (besides being delicious) is to give richness, tenderness and structure to cookies, cakes, pies and pastries. We alter the way butter works in a recipe by changing its temperature and choosing when to combine it with the other ingredients.

Most cookie recipes call for beating room-temperature butter. At a temperature between 70 and 72 degrees F, butter is soft enough to incorporate air, but not so soft that it will melt immediately in the oven and result in super-thin cookies.

The ingredients you used could be the culprit – using different sugars, melted butter, baking powder or baking soda can alter a cookie's texture and taste.

As a bonus, I did a little research to find out just what role each ingredient plays in chocolate chip cookies, so you can adjust your recipe however you feel like experimenting. Flour adds fluff and texture to the cookies. Adding too little flour can cause cookies to be flat, greasy, and crispy.

Check Your Cookie Dough's Consistency

After mixing your ingredients (sugar, flour, water, etc.), check that the consistency of your dough isn't: Tough – For rolled cookies, your dough can become “tough” by adding too much flour to your pin or counter before rolling it out.

Baking soda is typically used for chewy cookies, while baking powder is generally used for light and airy cookies. Since baking powder is comprised of a number of ingredients (baking soda, cream of tartar, cornstarch, etc.), using it instead of pure baking soda will affect the taste of your cookies.

The spongy texture and moist flavor that oil creates can be a boon to certain recipes. Not to mention oil is cheaper and easier to work with. Butter will always provide superior flavor and that melt-in-your-mouth texture. In many recipes, combining the two gives the best of both worlds.

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.

Warm butter is not able to hold onto it, so you're going to get a denser dough.” When using warmer or melted butter, cookies will struggle to lift and lighten, resulting in a cakier texture, like brownies.

How long should butter sit out before baking cookies? ›

To soften butter, we recommend leaving it on the kitchen counter for 30 minutes to an hour. Keep in mind that the speed at which your butter will soften depends on the temperature of your kitchen. If it's wintertime, you might need to leave your butter on the counter overnight to fully soften.

What happens when you bake without brown sugar? To be succinct, the resulting baked good could be slightly drier or more crisp. Without the excess moisture from the molasses in the brown sugar, the final cookie won't be as chewy and the final bread might be drier.

In that role, white sugar aerates the dough when creamed with butter for thick and puffy cookies. Brown sugar, meanwhile, is dense and compacts easily, creating fewer air pockets during creaming—that means that there's less opportunity to entrap gas, creating cookies that rise less and spread more.

Room temperature butter is just the right consistency to incorporate air when it's creamed with sugar. These trapped air pockets result in risen, fluffy cookies. If the butter is any warmer, it won't incorporate enough air and your cookies will have less rise.

Another thing you can use to counteract the raw, flour taste is to add flavorings to the batter or dough. Vanilla extract is commonly used, but there are other extracts and flavorings you can try, too. For example, almond extract goes well in baked goods with cherries and rum flavoring is great with a spice mixture.

One way is to add in some extra fat, such as more butter or even an extra egg yolk (which contains fat) — this will make the dough easy to work with again. Another way to fix the problem is to add in a bit of extra liquid, such as milk or water, which will help get the dough back to the consistency it needs to be.

If you realize that your gravy tastes like flour when you're almost finished, turn up the heat to maintain a rapid simmer for several minutes; then thin it again with more stock or water if necessary.

A chemical taste usually indicates too much baking soda or powder. At the same time, overly greasy cakes mean excessive butter or oil in the mixture. If your cake tastes floury, it is usually because there is too much flour or the cake is not fully cooked.