Baking cookies is all fun and games until you start doing it for a living. Creaming several pounds of butter and sugar together, and mixing large batches of cookie dough day after day is a lot of work.
That’s why you need a quality stand mixer. Whether you are a pro baker or a home baker who makes a lot of cookies, using a stand mixer for the process is definitely going to save you a lot of precious time and effort.
How to Get the Most Out of Your Stand Mixer?
Using your stand mixer to the fullest while baking cookies can save you a hell lot of time, and also make your job convenient.
Baking is an art in itself, it requires the perfect proportion, delicate handling, perfect timing of processes, and procedural operation.
The more you strive for perfection, the better your baked edibles are. Using a stand mixer could help you get a step closer to perfection!
Expert Tips to Make the Perfect Cookies Using a Stand Mixer
1. Use Your Stand Mixer to Cream Your Sugar and Butter
Creaming your butter and sugar is a crucial step while baking cookies. Butter is a delicious ingredient that helps add a smooth texture to your cookies and also enhances the taste.
While mixing, pay good attention. Mixing your sugar and butter non-uniformly can severely affect the taste and texture of your cookies.
To mix these two elements perfectly, add the required quantity of butter to a mixing bowl. Mix the butter using the stand mixer for approximately 30 seconds.
By doing this, your butter would have been softened to perfection. After 30 seconds of mixing, start adding sugar, and continue mixing.
The butter will have a lustrous white glaze. That’s a perfect consistency and mix you must aim for. Using your stand mixer in the right way here would help you master the art of mixing.
Alternatively, you could also use a traditional hand mixer. However, this would require a lot of manual effort and time.
2. Use a Scraper with Your Stand Mixer
Scraper is an attachment that you can easily buy online. A recent innovation in stand mixers, the scraper makes the life of every baker much easier.
Ensure that you get the right size for your stand mixer, as there are multiple sizes available in the market.
A scraper would be a great accessory for your stand mixer as it saves the cleaning time( which undoubtedly is the most boring step of baking).
Normally, you’d need to use a spatula for cleaning the insides of your stand mixer. However, getting a scraper would do the same on the fly.
As you mix, the scraper would scrape off the mixture getting stuck to the insides of the stand mixer. This would save up a lot of cleaning time! The scraper is especially lifesaving when mixing a liquid substance like cake batter.
3. Take Your Chocolate-filled Cookies to the Next Level
Now chocolate-filled cookies need a lot of mixing. Especially because they are liquid, the chocolate needs to be mixed perfectly such that it does not leak out through the external cookie dough.
Thickening chocolate can be done by cooking or mixing. However, cooling your liquid chocolate is not the recommended method.
This is mainly because you cannot control the consistency of your chocolate while cooling. Hence, mixing is the best option.
While mixing, you need to pour your molten chocolate into a bowl. Then use your standing mixer to thicken the chocolate. Thickening the chocolate using a stand mixer also gives the chocolate breathing space, which in turn helps bring out the most delicious flavor of the chocolate.
The consistency of molten chocolate must be almost slimy. A little solidish consistency isn’t a problem since the chocolate-filled cookie would be baked inside the oven.
This would melt the chocolate again. However, ensure that the filling is not too liquidy to ensure that the chocolate does not leak.
4. Make the Perfect Cloud Cookies
Cloud cookies and cloud cakes have been trending lately. They’ve taken over social media and all the food vloggers have been vlogging about them. Cloud cookies are these fluffy cookies that have a stable balance between crunch and fluffiness. The fluffiness actually comes from beaten egg whites.
The key to a good cloud cookie is a stable meringue. To create meringue, you need to beat egg whites at high speed until it turns foamy and fluffy.
Making meringue with a hand mixer is certainly possible but not convenient because it takes a lot of time. Here’s where stand mixers come into the picture.
With a stand mixer, you can just let the machine do its thing while you focus on other things. It can help you achieve the fluffy texture within 2 minutes of consistent fast mixing.
Why Choose a Stand Mixer Over a Hand Mixer for Making Cookies?
1. To Process Large Batches of Cookie Dough
A hand mixer can do pretty much everything a stand mixer does, but a lot more slowly. If you are a professional baker, you definitely need to invest in a quality stand mixer to make large batches of fresh cookies every single day.
The same goes for home bakers who bake frequently. A hand mixer will get the job done, but not as good or easily as a stand mixer.
2. To Saves Time and Energy
Stand mixers are mechanized and you needn’t mix your mixture manually. Mixing manually would take too long and would also require too much effort. Baking with the help of a stand mixer could hence be draining.
3. To Avoid Over/Undermixing
Baking requires perfection. Compromising with the mixing, or beating eggs would spoil the entire texture of the cookie.
The texture is a crucial aspect of baking and hence using a stand mixer while baking over a hand mixer would help you make near-perfect cookies, if not perfect ones!
Best Stand Mixer Attachments for Cookies
There are several stand mixer attachments for cookies that you could use to speed up the process.
Here are the attachments we recommend using to catalyze the process of making cookie dough:
- Wire whip
- Flat beater
- Dough hook
- Flex Edge
- Scraper
Each of the above listed attachments has a unique use. They could be your best friends while baking and save up time and energy!
A Final Note
Baking cookies is testing even for the most experienced bakers. It requires the usage of ingredients in the right proportion and perfection.
Using a stand mixer while baking could help you get closer to perfection and bake the most delicious cookies. So, try out these expert tips and let us know if the cookies tasted like they were straight out of heaven’s oven!