In winter, people like to treat themselves to something sweet to make the gray, dark days more enjoyable. Wrap yourself in a cozy blanket, drink hot chocolate or tea and snack on homemade biscuits – it couldn’t be more comfortable. Whether you are young or old, the smell of fresh biscuits will get you in the Christmas spirit and make hearts beat faster.
But if you take it exactly, mistakes are often made when baking biscuits. Luckily, pastries are still delicious in many cases.
1. Improvisation on materials
If you have experience in baking, you can improvise with many recipes or invent your own creations. Delicious flavors are often created this way. However, if you add too much or too little of the respective ingredients and the cookies may taste or have a completely different consistency than you might expect. If the biscuit will be successful in any case, it is worth following the tried and tested recipes with scales and measuring cups.
2. Do not refrigerate the dough
Short crust pastry is used for many biscuits. For this you need cold butter, which is not brought to room temperature as is usually the case during cooking. After kneading the dough, let it rest in the refrigerator for half an hour. If you don’t take the time, the biscuits will easily get distorted when you cut them and bake them.
3. Use too much flour
When the dough is ready to be rolled out and cut or shaped, it’s common to put too much flour on the rolling pin and work surface. This makes the cookies very dry. Therefore, it is better to use less flour and add a little more if necessary, than to use too much flour right away.
4. Do not use an egg timer
The shaped dough is usually placed in a preheated oven. Unlike bread or cake, biscuits are prepared relatively quickly, so you should not take your eyes off the oven for too long afterwards. It’s best to set an egg timer or alarm clock on your smartphone to avoid too harsh or even burnt desserts.
5. Open the oven door very often
After the cut dough enters the oven, the smell is seductive and impatience is high. However, you should only open the oven door after the scheduled baking time has elapsed, otherwise the dough may be damaged by the incoming cold air and the cookies in the front will crisp more slowly than the ones in the back. Normally, biscuits do not require long cooking times anyway.
6. Cool on hot tray
Like biscuits left in the oven for too long, biscuits that cool on a hot baking tray will become too hard or burnt. Cooked products will cool more evenly if, for example, you place them on a wire rack or on another surface with baking paper.
7. Store it wrong
It’s a shame that biscuits turn out perfectly and are not stored properly. The correct packaging may differ depending on the type of pastry. Pastries are usually stored in metal boxes in the classical way. Thus, it does not soften too much and the cookies stay there for a long time.