Effect of Mixing Times with Crystal Farms Butter II

I have attached a photo of butter cookies made the same way, with Crystal Farms butter, except for the time spent mixing after adding the flour to the creamed butter and sugar. The three cookies on the top were baked on the Wilton EverGlide nonstick pan. The ones on the bottom were baked on the Williams-Sonoma GoldTouch Commercial Cookie Sheet. The times, left to right, were one minute mixing, two minutes mixing, and three minutes mixing.

In general the cookies from the Wilton pan are a little larger, though it doesn't show so much in the photo. The cookies from the Williams-Sonoma sheet apparently don't spread as much - they come from the same batch of dough and even the same refrigerated rolls, so that's the only explanation.

The cookies from the one-minute mixing are obviously a disaster. These are actually the only butter cookies I've made on the Williams-Sonoma pan that didn't come out well. One minute mixing simply isn't enough. The two-minute cookies aren't quite as regular as the three-minute cookies. The non-circular shape from the Williams-Sonoma pan's two-minute sample was because the dough broke as I was cutting the cookie slices and I tried to put Humpty back together again. It didn't work very well! Of course, it tastes fine. However, you can see that the two-minute cookie on the Wilton pan had a fairly uneven surface, while the three-minute cookie was nice and smooth. That was representative of the entire sheetful. I also baked a batch of cookies mixed for two-and-a-half minutes. Those cookies looked just like the three-minute cookies.

Yesterday's post shows that pretty much all the air is knocked out of the dough by even one minutes' mixing, and from 1.5 minutes forward, additional mixing has no effect on air in the dough. That means the irregularities in the surface are simply from ingredients not being sufficiently dispersed amongst each other. For these cookies, 2.5 minutes mixing with my Sunbeam Mixmaster mixer, 20 seconds with half the flour and then 2.5 minutes with all of it, is perfect. Further mixing may or may not hurt, but it doesn't help, either.

I have a few additional interesting photos of the one-minute cookies, which I will post next time.