Art of the cookie: Quality ingredients ensue a sweet result

Here's expert advice from Susan Reid of King Arthur Flour Co. and Marc Haymond of the Culinary Institute of America:

• Butter vs. shortening: use good-quality butter with a high fat content to minimize spreading. (U.S. butter is graded according to quality, with the finest being AA.) Shortening, which has a higher melting point, will produce a cookie that's mroe crumbly but has better color.
• Light brown sugar vs. dark: Color is the only difference. In the old days, cark brown sugar had more momlasesk but that's no longer true. Pourable and liquid brown sugars should not be used for baking.
• All-purpose vs. pastry flour: All-purpose flour has a higher protein content and will produce an easier-to-handle dough. Pastry flour will create softer cookies. Professional bakers debate the merits, so it's your choice.
• Chilled cookie dough: Roll-out cookie dough is easier to work with when cold. For faster chilling, put in a zip-close bag, roll out with a rolling pin and stick in the fridge.
• Sticky dough: When dealing with particularly sitcky dough, roll out the dough directly on the cookie sheet. (If using a rimmed shet, flip it over for a flat surface.) Cut your shapes, remove the excess dough from around them and pop them in the oven. This will preserve the shape of the cookies.

Inferior butter with low fat and high water content will produce runny cookies. Less expensive brown sugar sometimes is fortified with plain glucose, Reid says, which will leave cookies flat.

If you're running into cookie trouble, suspect the ingredients first.

"When you're baking something you've made many times, and it doesn't come out right, people think it's them," Reid says. "Most of the time it's an ingredient shift."

then again, success and failure are relative when it comes to baking. "There's nothing bad about a cookie," says Susan reid, editor of the King Arthur Flour Co.'s newsletter. "Only good things come from cookies."

(Associated Press)