Many years ago, I worked at a café, where I was responsible for making hundreds of cookies, muffins, and scones each week. A topic of conversation that us bakers (ever the persnickety bunch!) never tired of was how to make a perfectly round cookie. Of course, there are many variables that can affect how and why a cookie spreads, including the type and amount of chemical leavening used, the temperature of the cookie dough when it’s baked, and the shape of the scooped cookie dough. (The pastry chef I worked for was convinced that the bottom of the dough had to be completely flat in order for it to bake into a perfectly round circle.)
But in the quest to create a perfectly round cookie, I’ve found only one method to be reliable, and it’s one I picked up from my Birmingham, Alabama-based colleague Nicole Hopper. When Nicole was developing her oatmeal raisin cookie recipe, she found that swirling a ring cutter around each freshly-baked cookie helped shape it into a nice round circle. For this to work, you have to use a ring cutter that’s an inch or two larger than the baked cookie, and you have to swirl it around the cookie when it’s still warm and barely set—ideally immediately after it comes out of the oven. Wait too long, and the cookie will firm up, making it impossible to shape.
Serious Eats / Fred Hardy
Of course, how a cookie tastes is much more important than how a cookie looks, and when I’m baking for myself, I couldn’t give a hoot about how they look. But if you are baking cookies for a special occasion, a bake sale, a holiday swap, or a gift basket and want to make each cookie look extra nice, then look no further than a trusty ring cutter. It takes less than two minutes to shape all the cookies on a rimmed baking sheet, and will leave you with flawlessly round cookies that look professionally made.
