Gooey Butter Cookies Recipe - The Cookie Rookie® (2024)

FAQs

What is the secret to gooey cookies? ›

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.

The signature dessert of St. Louis, this gooey butter cake is exactly what its name suggests: a wonderfully gooey treat that doesn't quite set when baked. Cake mix and cream cheese versions exist, but locals know that the original was made from scratch using yeast.

Cookies made with melted butter often deflate and become denser when they cool, resulting in a perfectly cooked fudgy center — a similar textural result to brownies that get rapped (aka banged against an oven rack mid-bake to deflate them) or Sarah Kieffer's iconic pan-banging cookies that turn out pleasantly compact.

Gooey butter cookies are the cookie form of gooey butter cake, which originated in St. Louis. The creation of the cake itself was actually an accident, but it was so delicious that it became a hit!

The key to keeping cookies fresh and soft is to seal them in an airtight container, like a resealable freezer bag. And here's a nifty little trick: add a piece of bread to the bag.

Miller and Colman Andrews, believe it was the accidental creation of Johnny Hoffman, a baker at St. Louis Pastries Bakery, in the 1940s. Gooey butter cake traditionally starts with a yeasted crust, which gets filled with a mixture of butter, sugar, eggs, corn syrup, and vanilla.

The ice cream cone became Missouri's official dessert in 2008.

Popping your dough in the fridge allows the fats to cool. As a result, the cookies will expand more slowly, holding onto their texture. If you skip the chilling step, you're more likely to wind up with flat, sad disks instead of lovely, chewy cookies. Cookies made from chilled dough are also much more flavorful.

Brown sugar, meanwhile, is dense and compacts easily, creating fewer air pockets during creaming—that means that there's less opportunity to entrap gas, creating cookies that rise less and spread more. With less moisture escaping via steam, they also stay moist and chewy.

If you're looking for chewiness and bend, bread flour could be a handy addition to your cookie recipes. Fun fact: Alton Brown even named his signature bread flour Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe “The Chewy." Baker's tip: Looking for another way to add a little extra chew? Use brown sugar in your cookie dough.

What state is known for butter cookies? ›

Some websites say Mississippi is one of the few states that doesn't have an official food. However, Taste of Home says butter cookies are an official state food of Mississippi.

The first American cookies that showed up in cook books had creative names like Jumbles, Plunkets and Cry Babies which gave no clue to what was inside the cookie. As the expansion of technology grew in the United States, new ingredients started to show up in cookie recipes.

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.

Not using enough fat in the dough.

A greater fat ratio (butter, margarine, shortening, etc.) to flour will result in a more tender cookie. Start by adding just a ¼ cup additional to your recipe.

Salted butter, softened – I prefer salted butter but you can also use unsalted and add an extra pinch of salt to the dough. Brown sugar – Just brown sugar because we will get the 'granulated sugar' flavor from the corn syrup. Corn syrup – The corn syrup is what makes these cookies CHEWY FOR DAYS.

Eggs bind the ingredients and make for moist, chewy cookies. Adding too many eggs can result in gummy, cake-like cookies.