Grandma's Sour Cream Sugar Cookies Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What happens if you add too much sugar to sugar cookies? ›

Sugar sweetens the cookies and makes them an enticing golden brown. Adding too little sugar can affect the taste and texture of cookies. Adding too much can cause them to be brittle. Take your time creaming the sugar and butter together at the beginning.

Cornstarch helps product soft and thick cookies. Using more brown sugar than white sugar results in a moister, softer cookie. An extra egg yolk increases chewiness. Rolling the cookie dough balls to be tall and lumpy instead of wide and smooth gives the cookies a bakery-style textured thickness.

Almond Extract: For a twist on the traditional sugar cookie flavor, try adding a small amount of almond extract. Start with 1/2 teaspoon and adjust according to your preference. Citrus Zest: Incorporate the zest of citrus fruits like lemon, orange, or lime into the dough. The zest adds a bright and refreshing flavor.

To fix this, you can add more fat to the dough. This can be in the form of butter, shortening, or even olive oil. Just add a little at a time until the dough comes together and is no longer crumbly. You may also need to add more liquid, such as milk or water, to get the right consistency.

The chemistry of sugar attracts water molecules, so cutting it out can make your baked goods too tough and dry. If you really want to cut back, sugar can usually be reduced by about a third without seeing a major difference in texture.

An excessive amount of butter makes it where the flour is unable to absorb the combined fat, which causes the cookie to spread too widely and the sugar to carbonize more easily because it's surrounded by too buttery a dough.

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.

Light corn syrup is another ingredient that you can add to cookie dough that will help it stay softer longer. The corn syrup you buy at the grocery store is not the high-fructose corn syrup that soft drinks are made with; it's a sugar that is liquid at room temperature and helps other sugars say liquid at high heat.

Different types of sugars affect the texture because they absorb different amounts of water. Remember moisture is the key! White sugar creates crispier cookies and brown sugar creates chewier cookies.

Can you over mix sugar cookie dough? ›

Working the dough too much.

bad habit of mixing in the dry ingredients until they were completely incorporated. And then mixing the dough even more, for no good reason. Thankfully I was eventually steered in the right direction. Over-working the dough yields a tough cookie, which is not at all what you want.

If the baked cookies taste a bit bland (and if the dough is fairly soft and receptive to additions), add salt and/or spices to the remaining dough before baking. If, on the other hand, they're a bit salty for your taste, try rolling the dough balls in sugar before baking.

1. Cookies. Cornstarch does kind of incredible things to cookies. I mean not only does it give them soft centers, prevents them from spreading, and makes them somewhat thick (in a good way), but it also contributes to the chewiness factor, which, in my opinion, is the most important cookie attribute.

If your cookies are rock hard, the site explains that it's likely due to an over-abundance of sugar, which hardens, darkens, and flattens the cookies as they bake. Bake or Break adds that over-mixing your dough can be the culprit, too. When flour is blended with other ingredients, gluten starts to form.

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

If your dish is a little too sweet, try rounding out the sweetness by adding flavors or ingredients that are sour, bitter, or spicy. It may be obvious not to add more sweet ingredients, but you should also stay away from salty ones since they actually bring out the sweetness in food.

The lower the sugar, the less cookies spread, the drier/more crumbly they are. Cookies with less sugar taste less sweet, of course. But beyond that, their flavor also becomes flat; sugar is a flavor enhancer much like salt is.

Consuming excess sugar leads to a condition called insulin resistance, which is a precursor to type 2 diabetes, a fatty liver, and cardiovascular disease. Insulin is responsible for the body's absorption of glucose — or sugar — for energy. Those with insulin resistance experience a buildup of glucose in the blood.

"If you're eating more sugar to try and get your energy levels back up after a crash, you're bound to crash again. Instead, go for something that delivers a mix of protein and fiber, like apple slices and peanut butter (made without added sugar), to slowly bring your blood sugar levels back up to normal," Seaver says.