Swore I'd never use a scale for baking until my cookies came out like frisbees last Saturday

I was that person who always eyeballed measurements because my grandma did and her stuff was amazing. Then last weekend I tried to make chocolate chip cookies for a friend's BBQ in Austin and they spread flat like pancakes. My girlfriend laughed and told me to weigh the flour next time so I borrowed her kitchen scale. Turns out I was scooping almost 50 percent more flour than the recipe called for because I was packing it in the cup. Three batches later I got perfect chewy cookies with actual structure. I even weighed the butter and sugar too and everything just clicked. Has anyone else had that moment where a tool you hated fixed a consistent fail?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_elizabeth10d ago

My friend's neighbor swears by those fancy scales but her cookies are always dry and crumbly so I don't know if it's really that deep. I've been measuring flour with the same dented metal cup since college and my banana bread turned out fine last week. Maybe it's more about the recipe itself or the temp of your butter than some exact gram count. People act like a few extra grams of flour is the end of the world and it's just cookies not neurosurgery. If they taste good and don't fall apart who cares if they're not magazine cover perfect. I guess weighing stuff works for some folks but I think we overthink baking sometimes.

skyler_anderson6510d ago

I had almost the exact same thing happen with my chocolate chip cookies last spring. Weighed my flour for the first time and realized I'd been using almost 150 grams instead of 120 in my cup. It's wild how much difference those extra 30 grams make.