Butt-Ugly Butter Cookies

I am making progress on the final cookie pan calibrations, but it's taking longer than it should have, mostly because I changed the way I'm doing it somewhat. Meanwhile, I have certainly been having trouble with the butter cookie recipe I am using for calibration. I mentioned the extremely flat, dark brown cookies I baked a few days ago, and said I didn't know what caused it. The next time I made the recipe, the cookies came out much better, pretty much like they were when I began the calibrations. Yesterday they came out midway between those two. Luckily not so bad I couldn't use them for calibrating - in my opinion - but as the title of this post mentions, they are butt-ugly. I've attached a photo. They look like they have had smallpox. When I first take them out of the oven, I can see butter boiling up out of the holes, but that stops immediately when they hit the room air.

The cookies coming off some pans show this more than other cookies. The ones coming off the insulated pans, significantly, don't display this at all and look quite nice. I think perhaps the problem shows up when the pan metal gets overly hot, and the insulated pan doesn't do that. The same may be true of the light tradition-finish pan that reflects more heat than the non-stick pans. Perhaps if I lowered the temperature by twenty-five degrees this wouldn't happen with any of the pans, but the fact is, sometimes it is a problem and sometimes it isn't, and I'm determined to find out how to make the recipe so that it simply is not an issue.

Unlike the dough I made up a few days ago that I wound up throwing out entirely, these were made with fresh butter. I thought maybe the dough got a little warmer with this batch before I refrigerated it than when the cookies came out all right. I'm not 100% certain I added baking powder, but I think I did. When they came out all right I used about 15% baker's sugar with 85% granulated cane sugar, instead of 100% granulated cane sugar like when they came out poorly, both times. I am not controlling the creaming operation or mixing operations very much so far, though, so there are quite a few things to look at. I think the first cookies I'll be working on perfecting will be butter cookies, since there's plenty of room for education in solving this problem.

I read that egg yolks in baking serve as emulsifiers, and when they are not used in a cake, for example, the cake may sag in the center instead of retaining the air within the baked dough. That's a little bit like what is happening with these pockmarks in the cookies, so perhaps the solution is simply to add eggs. Significantly, I found about eight recipes for butter cookies on the Internet and they all include eggs or egg yolks - a very strong hint! On the other hand, I didn't add eggs when they came out without pockmarks. Furthermore, I have several recipes for butter cookies in my cookbooks, and they do not all include eggs. In fact, most don't. I want to learn how to make the recipe reproducibly, both with and without pockmarks, without resorting to eggs. Then I'll add egg yolks and see if that alone is enough to fix the problem. First, though, I need to learn how to control all the variables - if I can! I hope others will learn from the experience.