Answers to all your Cookie Questions! | Cupcake Jemma

[Music] hello everybody welcome to the crumbs and doilies kitchen here in london i've got my clipboard that means only one thing now a couple of weeks ago dana and i asked you guys what is going on with your cookies we want to know what your troubles are what you're finding difficult why your cookies are not coming out perfect i mean most of them are but you know sometimes we get questions from you guys over on instagram so we thought we'd dedicate a whole video to it right yeah definitely and if you don't know what we're talking about we've got a whole nyc cookie playlist over on the youtube channel so go and check that out and this is probably not the first video you've watched see me as well like and subscribe it's just there so yeah what's not to like exactly cool so what we're gonna do we thought the best thing to do would be to run through our very classic choc chip new york style cookie recipe answering your questions along the way right yeah all right let's do this so okay first things first is butter oh good because i've got a question already go for it okey dokey so tamagen asked and got loads of thumbs up on this one can you tell us a bit more about the butter that crumbs and doilies use and how does that actually affect the kind of quality of the cookie well it's very important it's the first and probably one of the most important ingredients here at c d we use less girl butter it's french it's really high quality and it's got a really high fat content which is super important in these cookies which means it stays nice and cold for as long as possible um but we did actually go to the store because i mean i've never seen a plaque of butter no but lucky for you guys you can get like 82 fat content butters in like all supermarkets and they all work really well we tested loads and we did like own brands we did a few branded ones as well and they all work perfectly the most important thing is that it stays cold which means you absolutely cannot be using margarine don't do it don't do it don't even say the word um it's not better even if it's got some butter in it it's going to be like packed for things like olive olive oil oil and buttermilk and stuff because they are designed to be soft at room temperature which is the opposite of what we're trying to do here we want to keep this as cold as possible all the way through yes so top tip for keeping it cold keep it in the fridge if you get distracted just pop it back in the fridge and we've already got some chopped here so you want to chop it up put it back in the fridge so that yeah they're really like cold hard little cubes there we go super hard and here's my it in the mixer it's going in so once that's in it is time to straight away at our next ingredient which is sugar and we use two different types of sugar in our cookie recipe soft light brown which is this stuff and we've got caster sugar as well cool so before we get on with the types of sugar um stephanie wanted to i this isn't going to go down well with you okay stephanie wanted to know what can you do to reduce the sweetness in our cookies well stephanie cookies are sweet and they're going to stay that way because the sugar is super important especially in this recipe it um accumulates to the the structure and the way that these cookies bake yeah you want to keep all of the sugar there are a few things that we can do like because we get it not everyone's got a sweet tooth as we have yeah or like the rest of the gang here are crunchies and we're like sugar addicts yeah so a few things that you could do you could up the salt content maybe yeah get that salty kind of sweet vibe going on that'd be really nice yep or you could um remove the vanilla if the recipe says vanilla because that's quite sweet as well it is or you could change up the chocolate chips use something like a 70 so it's a little bit more bitter in there yeah but essentially no sugar is important sugar is really important um so like don't mention we have got two types of sugar going in they both do different things all sugars do different kind of things so we've got caster sugar which gives you the sweetness and then we've got soft light brown sugar which is a bit kind of stickier yeah gives you a more kind of chewy um yeah caramel flavor chewy texture yeah um which leads us on to melania's question which is okay why does the sugar remain grainy and crunchy once my cookies are baked that's a good one well milena i'd probably first ask which sugar are you using and is it one of these because there's lots of different types of sugars and they all look very similar to these yes if we head over here we actually wanted to show you guys because we do get it so this is caster sugar this is what we want you to use look how soft and fine it is and then let's jump over here this is granulated sugar so it looks pretty similar but you can just see how much thicker it is right it's much coarser and the same with our soft brown sugars we've got soft light brown sugar which is what we use here lovely and soft and fine and then we've got a dark brown sugar which is super coarse and thick and also a demerara sugar which looks like light brown sugar but it's just too thick right too thick yeah because when we're mixing this you're going to see we do not want to over mix because over mix leads to not good cookies we'll show you what they're going to look like later but basically we're not giving the chance for the sugar to dissolve at all so if you're using one of these thick coarse sugars they're just going to remain that way even when they've baked yeah definitely right get it in and we'll start mixing if you don't have any more sugar related no i don't but i do have a mixing question and that is how long do we mix each stage for that's a good question so i think in every video we pretty much always say around 30 to 40 seconds right there our videos are edited down and something that might take us one minute on screen might take you three minutes in real life so it's important to really pay attention to the consistency of your dough and we'll show you what that looks like when we get it mixing cool so we're gonna get this mixing on a kind of slow speed and we're gonna look for these buttery sugary nuggets sounds weird right we'll show you so indeed this has been mixing for about 40 seconds and as promised this is what it looks like yeah so you can see there's all different size blobs of butter going on here they haven't kind of creamed together like you would a cake kind of better um yeah and all we can explain it is buttery sugary nuggets they're all different sizes you want it to be chunky because the chunkiness leads to the kind of chunky cookie result that we're looking for yeah so what happens next well we've got our auditions these are chocolate chip cookies we've got two types of chocolate cool right good because frida wants to know can you leave an additional ingredient out or do you have to replace it well frida i don't know why you want to leave chocolate out of cookies because it's essential and they're pretty but we understand you might not like chocolate or you might be allergic to like nuts or something or you might like dried fruit so you can definitely leave any of those editions out it just means that you'll have a little bit less dough to work with yeah and um if you're thinking about replacing or changing substituting those additions then make sure you focus on the volume and not the weight because something like freeze-dried recipes is super light so if you have 400 grams of that it'd be all raspberry no dough so probably cost you an arm and a leg yeah definitely alrighty good cool so so these are going in we've got 54 and some milk chocolate here as well mmm favorite so we're going to mix those through again on a low speed and this time it's probably like 20 30 seconds just to kind of distribute the chocolate um around those buttery sugary nuggety bits yeah okay next question from hala hello hello hello hello um wants to know if she wants to make more than one batch is it just a case of doubling all the ingredients it is so this recipe is pretty forgiving and if you double it um it won't have an effect on the bake or the quality of the cookies yes the only thing you want to watch out for is the um standard of your mixer yeah because the dough can be quite heavy um so if you're putting two lots in there you just want to make sure that your mixer can handle it um because we really don't want to be receiving your bills for broken mix [Laughter] coming out of here yeah yeah but doubling it yeah just double everything if you want to half it and just make six cookies which is bizarre in a way you'd ever want to do that but you just have all the ingredients it's as easy as that yes so next time next is our dry ingredients we've got flour and we've got salt and baking powder yes so this is great because we've got quite a lot of flour related questions and the first one is from divya and divi wants to know if i run out of self-raising flour because we use a lot of self-raising flour in our recipes can you substitute it for all plain flour and if so how much raising agent do you need to add you can indeed well we did a little experiment with that sally's gonna go and get them and you'll see what they came out like and we kind of made our own self-raising flour so here you can see that we made yeah we made our own self-raising flour um in a recipe that normally uses half plain half self-raising and look they look great exactly the same right yeah they look perfect so the answer to your question is yes and what's the rule did you say so yeah the rule is for every 150 grams of plain flour you want to add two teaspoons of baking powder so we essentially made our own self-raising yeah perfect um and because i just said like sometimes we use a mixture of self-raising and plain yeah lola noticed this and she wanted to know does this actually make a difference it does yes definitely depends on the recipe especially for us in our red velvet recipe it's got a little bit more liquid with the food coloring and the amount of vanilla and so we played around with that and we tend to use all plain flour in that it just has higher gluten content and the structure is a lot stronger yes it is exactly that plain flour is nice and structured um so if you've got a kind of sticky spready one then you want to go with plain anyway that's it let's get that in there now i know we're not making chocolate cookies or anything but cm magical mysterious cm wanted to know do we use dutch processed or natural cocoa powder when we do make chocolate cookies good question there are two different types out there and we use the dutch processed which is this one here as you can see it looks a lot nicer right yeah it looks intense a lot darker it's a lot richer in flavor yeah and if you're gonna make something super chocolatey you want to use this one because you're gonna use a lot less as well to get that super chocolatey flavor yeah you'd probably have to use a lot of this one to get the kind of intensity of the dutch process so yeah yeah we do use that and you can find it relatively easily especially if you look online yeah get yourself a massive burger and then yeah then you'll never run out alrighty so let's mix this yes um and what are we looking for now well again we're mixing on a low speed and we're looking for kind of an irregular sandy rubble mixture nothing's creamed or mixed together yet fat good looking good and again we'll show you what this looks like so it's a really dry sandy consistency you've got those bits of butter in there that's still quite fun the chocolate chips the sugar and you can't even see the sugar because it's so fine yeah and actually quite a lot of people asked about the fact that they still had lumps of butter at this stage and that is exactly what you want right because that is how we get our chunky cookies so now we've got our kind of rubble um we need to bind it together right yeah using some eggs yes which is great because maeve wanted to know that well she mentioned sometimes when she adds her egg to bind the mixture it's still crumbling what should she do well maeve the answer is just add a little bit more egg yes because eggs come in all shapes and sizes right like look at these two they're pretty obviously different in size and these came from the same packet of eggs yeah um and we use large eggs here but even a large egg can range between like 63 and 73 grams yeah something like that and a medium egg is a lot smaller too yeah so add more egg so what we would say is have a little emergency egg on standby stand by eggs and then once you've added your two eggs or however many your recipe asks for we can then look at it and see if it needs more and we'll show you what it needs to look like and if yours looks a little bit dry then go ahead and add a wee bit more egg at a time yes this is nearly there yes this is looking good so let's just come and have a little look and you can see what we mean by it's not dry okay so it's still quite crumbly hey but it's not it's not dry you can't see any actual bits of flour no right so how do we know when this is ready so we know when it's ready when as sadly said it's a little bit crumbly and also it's starting to come away from the sides of the bowl nice and cleanly so this needs a few more seconds all right so what it hasn't done is it hasn't formed a dough right it hasn't come together in one big ball and that's really important because this is one of the top questions that you guys had and that is why are my cookies spreading wow it's all down to this stage over mixing the batter absolutely that's something you don't want to do and we did another experiment showing you what will happen if you did over mix your dough and you can see we basically mixed these for just an extra minute and you can see if i bring on some of our number one cookies this is what we want them to look like and this is what happens when you over mix them so they've kind of flattened they're probably not as gooey inside either because they're thinner and they haven't got that gorgeous knobbly bubbly chunky exterior yeah this is kind of cracked almost like a dry desert kind of a dry desert no one wants a dry desert cookie so when you mix your butter you want to make sure that it hasn't all come together into one big blob of a dough yes and now it's fun time time for the bowling stage balling stage so we're gonna whack it all onto the surface as per usual there we go when the guys make cookies here they use the massive mixers and they pour out a tablespoon full of dough sneak a bit in your mouth we don't do that all righty so same let's talk about the balling so we like to do 125 gram balls right we do we do um and jane's going to demonstrate his clan clunk because one of the best things about our cookies we think is the fact that they look so chunky and irregular and gorgeous and a lot of that is down to the kind of squishy clunkiness roll our balls in so go on then exactly 125. um you can see when i put it on the scales it's not even you know you can still kind of tear it apart which is super important because we're going to plunk it together right now so i've just kind of pressed it a little bit with a firm press i tend to describe it as sally says it's a clunk clunk done look at that done it's firm but it still has that knobbly appearance what you don't want to do yes let's have a look at this with your dough is this so you don't want to grab it keep scrunching it like this or roll it into a smooth ball you can see the difference here you can and you can see the difference not just there but in the cookies so these have been overrolled and they were really nice and smooth like that and these are the dane clunk clunk and you can just see like how kind of smooth and again they've flattened out a lot as well they haven't remained nice and chubby they haven't we want chubby cookies cool so question from nina okay nina all right so we like 125 grand balls right but nina wants to know if she wants a smaller ball something around i don't know 57 grams oh very precise very precise would she be reducing the oven temperature and or the bake time we've got it pretty much spot on you only need to change one of those elements and that is the baking time so oh i've put some down but you can mess down there if you want lucky for you nina we baked you some of your very own 57 gram cookie balls super cute oh they are so cute i mean i don't really know why i'd want a small cookie when you could have a big cookie bag that's one mouthful nina sort of your mouth yes we'll test it later so we did some 57 grams some 80 grams and some 100 grams and you can see down this side that we just had to reduce the bake time by a couple of minutes each time so the little baby ones here they were in for 12 minutes so you want to leave the oven temperature exactly the same yeah and just reduce the bake time brilliant there we go fabulous fabulous indeed so let's just crack on let's just do a little bit of balling shall we okay i'm going to do the dane clunk clunk here we go because another question we had uh from eamon yes with if they want a more kind of flatter cookie than a cookie yeah is it just a case of using less dough well if you use less stone you'll get less cookie yeah like nina's little 57 gram cookies yeah exactly and again we did a little experiment we did when we're at the boiling stage we squashed some yeah we kind of did this yeah so they were like this because we thought i wonder what happens if you squish them will they come out kind of thin um and they did but where are they flat balls that's what i called them there you go so they have baked a lot thinner again let me get back one of ours and they've got that kind of flat desert thing is that what you do um so yeah they have baked thinner eamen but i think what you might be after is a thin chewy totally different recipe um which maybe we should do one here on the channel we've actually got a similar one which is the trash can cookie so go and check that out and it'll be kind of more similar to what you're looking for yeah i mean there's definitely a time and a place for a thin chewy cookie oh yeah it's just not this place okay just give us two seconds to finish balling and we'll crack on with the next stage last one oh perfect he's good it's real good so now what do we do once we've clunk lumped all our balls next stage is the freezing stage we always freeze these cookies and it's super important yes because what we want to get is a nice chunky cookie that remains chunky once it's baked and that is because we've frozen it right yeah um and this leads us on to a really top question that a lot of you have been asking us for ages about so long that is why have my cookies not spread so we had the spreading situ and now we've got the opposite they're not spreading and i think that your cookies probably look a little bit like this right they look more like kind of rock cakes or scones or something yeah so this kind of stumped us for a little while we're not gonna lie yeah we played around with a lot of different things with different ingredients different bake times different temperatures we just couldn't get it and then finally we twigged we did it's got to be down to the freezer temperature because just like an oven or a fridge the freezers have different temperatures um and we we tested this we did we all took a thermometer home and we put it in a freezer and measured them mine was at about -14 sam's is like -17 and yours is a whopping like minus 24 which is super cold like so cold it's like 10 degrees different to danes here yeah and obviously that's going to have an effect which is obvious to us maybe not to you we'll explain it right so if you've got a really super overly chilled ball you're putting it into your hot oven the really hot oven is going to cook the outside of your cookie first because oven's cooked from the outside in not like a microwave which does weird things don't like your cookies or do and let us know what happens to them anyway back on topic outside of your cookie is cooked first straight away it's got its real crispy um crusty coating to it before the inside has even had a chance to warm up and therefore once it starts to cook it's got nowhere to spread to because the shell has already formed yes therefore resulting in these i mean they're kind of cute but they know they're not what we want from a cookie um and this is fine if you can adjust the temperature of your freezer so a freezer should generally be at -18 that's what we have all the crumbs once set too but my freezer i couldn't adjust at all yours didn't have a tan yeah it's probably used a bit newer than mine maybe an old school freezer so i'm stuck right i'm stuck at minus 24 degrees what do i do we had some ideas about maybe you can thaw out the cookie ball a little bit but that didn't quite work it didn't work no so then we actually tried and succeeded what i did was i turned down my oven so instead of baking 180 i baked it at 170 just for a little bit longer it was more like 18 to 19 minutes so you just want to do a lower and slower bake and they spread out and it was oh it was like a revelation i know when you messaged i was like oh my god i can't believe what my eyes are seeing news guys so there we go that's what you want to do if you're getting big old chunky cookies like this have a look at your oven temperature i mean you freeze the temperature if you can if you can't change it then you want to reduce the bake temperature and increase the bake time yeah that's a really good yeah i think we sold it i think we really did well done us so shall we go bake some cookies i'm gonna go to the freezer yeah um and i'll meet you at the oven okay perfect i'm gonna move this out the way as well here we go so we've already got our baking tray in the oven it's super hot it's preheated to 180 degrees celsius yes which brings us on to our next question we've switched quiz masters here nathan asked do you use fan assisted ovens for all of your recipes yes we absolutely do all our ovens at both bakeries here i'm just going to make loads of cookies okay everyone's hungry they're all fan assisted but we do know that some people don't have a fan assisted oven um there are a few things you can do okay so the first thing would be to up the temperature by 20 degrees yep um and then you want to make sure that you preheat your oven enough you want to do that anyway right but with a non-fan assisted oven you haven't got the use of a fan to help circulate all the air yeah and then from there you just want to test like the hot spots in your oven so most people want to bake in the middle but the best thing you do is grab an oven thermometer right yeah that's super cheap and like this one you can get it from cupcakedjemma.com and with any oven that you've got it's really helpful to test where the hot spots are and what your oven actually bakes at compared to what you said on the dial absolutely yeah so we're going to make these for 16 minutes have you got some quick fire questions in the meantime i do okay let's head back over there cool quick fire questions shruti asked how long would these cookies keep for and how do i store them to keep them at their best okay so cookies will keep for like what three to four days yeah but the best thing about these cookies is that you can bake the amount that you need they can stay in the freezer for like three months heaven knows how you can last so if you do end up baking more than you actually eat then yeah store them in a tupperware container yeah somewhere nice and cool and dry and also what you can do a little top tip here is you can put your cookie in an oven at 170 for five minutes just to warm it up so you have a warm gooey cookie whenever you want one yeah and you can do that from frozen as well yes best if you've got like a biscoff or nutella center delicious yeah they've got to be gooey and easy man yeah cool next next is puppy love i love this name why do store-bought cookies last for months and months and months whereas freshly baked cookies go stale after a few days ah i love this question it's so cool because you're totally right puppy love if that is your real name um when you buy a packet of cookies they've probably been in the store for weeks maybe even months and they might be in the back of your cupboard for months and they still remain crispy and fresh like what gives what's going on yeah yeah so basically when you bake cookies or when we make cookies or anything we're using fresh ingredients right like butter and eggs which are perishable and they have a shelf life yeah um if you look yeah yeah oh yeah well if you look on the back of the packet of like store-bought cookies or biscuits you might not find the same fresh ingredients there might be something like vegetable oil in there or preservatives or stabilizers which is designed to keep the product on the shelf for as long as possible before you guys buy it yes cool nice question yeah so moving on elizabeth asked when creating new cookie flavors how do you come up with the ratios for the ingredients yeah elizabeth is like the most fun thing ever come up with flavors a lot of it comes down to just experience and learning about how different ingredients work um but essentially if you've got your kind of base cookie recipe like we do it's just about changing the additions and any kind of flavorings that you want to put in that's not going to affect the structure of the cookie yeah it's all about trial and error and also write everything down oh you don't want to do something come up with something magical and then you think how many grams do i have this so go get yourself some really nice stationery right you love a bit of stationery stationery highlighters everything yeah the amount of times i forget to write stuff down and i'm so annoyed with myself all the time because i don't follow my own like rules yeah so write everything down even if it goes wrong you want to know what went wrong so um yeah and keep just playing around keep playing around yeah cool so sarah asked how do i know when my cookies are baked as the cookies are always soft well sarah let's just wait for these cookies to bake sorry and then we can show you then we'll show you exactly what they need to look like when they bake because we get it sometimes they do look soft but they will be stuffed when they come out the oven give us for like 10 more minutes and we're going to show you [Music] [Music] [Laughter] they smell really really good they smell incredible oh thank you so as you can see let's i mean these are really really hot but i'm gonna give them a little poke come in nice and close can you see how that looks ridiculously soft still super squishy super soft but remember that things are going to firm as they cool down like these are still super hot they're going to kind of almost continue cooking right because they're hot yeah the tray is hot so what you want to jinx for sarah is a nice golden brown crust on your cookies just like these are here if they aren't quite golden brown you want to leave them in but what you don't want to do is cook these bake these cook i said cook fake until these are like hard when they come in the oven because then when they kind of no gross when they cool down they'll be like biscuits they'll be crunchy we ain't cooking biscuits we are baking cookies yes cool so that's how you know that is how you know but what if my cookies are burnt and you bake them at 180 degrees c yes good question so a bit like earlier when we talk about the oven thermometer this is what you want to get you really want to get one of these because whatever your oven says on the outside it might be totally different on the inside like dane bait sam that 180 your head did i think he's got some i brought them in a tupperware tupperware he's so cute and they came out a little bit different too my oven is super hot and you can see these are banned not what we're looking for so if yours are coming out like that and you don't have an oven thermometer you just want to bake one cookie at a time right that's literally the best thing about these cookies is that you can take one out of the freezer bake it see what happens to it and then you can adjust your bake time or your oven temperature until you've got the perfect looking cookie and remember to write it down so that you know what you're doing next time exactly and test i think it's a test with an oven thermometer yeah yeah you've got one yeah um but what about if the cookies are burnt underneath yes good oh yeah okay that's a really good question because we tell you guys the best way to get a crispy bottom because we want a crispy bottom is to put your oven tray into the oven before we put the cookies in because that way you get a nice heat coming from the bottom of your um baking tray but if you've got quite a thin baking tray then the chances are you are going to get a burnt butter it's got a thin tray so a few things that you can do i mean you can invest in a really nice high quality baking tray or if you know they're burning then maybe don't warm your tray up like we tend to do here or if you don't want to buy another oven a baking tray and you already have two that are probably the same size pop them both together and you'll double up your trays that means the heater will get through to the not get through to the cookies as quickly because you've got like a thicker material for the heat to get through yeah cool wow we've only got one last question oh my gosh before we can delve in yeah um what is your most ultimate number one cookie flavor ah okay you've only got one that is a good one i didn't think you were gonna say that i know but i love it i love chocolate chocolate's my favorite thing in the whole world and i love the double chocolate particularly our one oh because it's like the black cocoa i just love it it's like got a really lovely kind of bitter taste to it so it's not too sweet and i just love chocolate nice what about you go go mine is the original chocolate and walnut the milk chocolate and warner that we first started with because it reminds me of our love of cookies and takes us back to new york as well well we wish we could go back take us back to new york oh one day really soon we really really hope yeah oh cool so that's our questions now but we can't get away with not answering all the questions there were about vegan cookies yes because there's been lots ever since we first started making this cookie yeah and we know a lot of you want to go try some vegan recipes um and don't worry we have been doing it and maybe you've come to see indy soho and you've had our very first vegan cookie which the guys here nikki and the gang have been like trying loads of different recipes and they cracked it and they've done the most amazing double chocolate raspberry vegan cookie and it is incredible so good they're super but they're fudgy and intensely chocolatey yeah really good really really delicious so if you're in soho or you're coming to london make sure you get one of those you can order them from crumbs and doilies and cupcake jam as well and maybe just maybe we'll bring you the recipe very soon we will we promise we promise we hereby promise to bring you a vegan cookie at some point in the near-ish future cool but until then we're just going to break open oh i'm not going to break one of those that's way too hard hey okay okay let's break this open just so you can see what we're talking about in case you've never had one of these you're gonna have one of those right you do exactly delicious cool thank you so much and we really hope that we managed to answer all the questions that you guys have about cookies and baking um it's been really fun actually figuring out a lot of it as well yeah so if you want to see more kind of like 101 master classes then we do have a few up on the channel already like gemma did a good cupcake one yeah there's a cake baking one as well um and let us know if there's other things that you would like to delve deep into yeah and for the wires and house yeah baking yeah and we will do our very best to bring you up yeah but we'll be back um next week um with on next thursday thursday coming up in a couple of days with a cupcake recipe is going to be for key lime pie cupcakes and they are the bomb don't miss it as nikki thebomb.com to say all right guys we'll see you really soon thank you thank you so much [Music] [Music] you

Channel: CupcakeJemma

Views: 133,820

Rating: 4.955513 out of 5

Keywords: Cupcake, cupcake jemma, jemma, gemma, cupcakes, bake, baking, how to make, recipe, crumbs & doilies, baker, buttercream, cake, cakes, vanilla, chocolate, jemma wilson, crumbs and doilies, bakery, perfect, easy, home made, hand made, simple, fool proof, dessert

Id: oUxH6xzUGtw

Length: 33min 32sec (2012 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 17 2021