I’ve seen so many of those baking fails when someone tries cutting a heart or unique shape but the dough bakes and spreads into a giant blob or circle lol
Edit: Thank you for all of your responses! I guess most of us can agree on it being fat content and chilling the dough, but it can be any number of factors affecting how it comes out when baked.
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In short dough is solid at room temperature but a liquid at high temperature, during baking.
You have to keep everything really cold or it will blob out. A trick is to freeze the cut out cookies before baking. The people who fail probably took too long and baked it warm.
I think the issue is usually that the people are using dough that isn’t meant to retain its shape. I have cut sugar cookie dough with knives and with cutters – it retains its shape either way, because it is a heartier dough with less fat (less melty). If I do the same with chocolate chip cookie dough, it will spread into a blob regardless of cutting method. The dough compositions are completely different, but people may not realize that. So, they try to cut shapes out of dough that isn’t hearty like sugar cookie dough, for example.
I’m not a cook but the science makes sense. One fluid downward motion will be a cleaner cut and more likely to seal the edges. A dragging motion is more likely to leave micro tears in the soft dough. That creates “pores” for relatively unstable dough ingredients to escape, making a relatively worse result
So many things determine how a cookie behaves in the oven. Ratio of ingredients, temperature of dough when it goes in, how long ago it was mixed, how hard it was mixed, how thick the sheet of dough is.
Most of the cookie fails I’ve seen where the cookie spread out into a blob come from either too much fat or the wrong fat in the dough (like butter vs vegetable oil), room temperature dough going into the hot oven, rather than chilled or frozen first, or just being a recipe that was made to spread out into big, circular cookies (like chocolate chip cookie dough vs shortbread cookies.)
Not all cookie doughs are the same! Each one typically has sugar, eggs, butter/fat, and flour. The amount of each can vary.
Sugar cookie or shortbread cookie dough often has more flour and less eggs, and these are easily shaped and retain their shape when baked. Gingerbread cookie dough is another example of a cookie dough designed to keep it’s shape.
Other cookie dough, like chocolate chip or oatmeal raisin, they’re not intended to be shaped and often contain less flour and more fat, making them spread and puff up.
Pastry Chef here! As I understand it, when you cut straight down, whether with a cookie cutter or a knife, you create a clean break in the dough and basically seal the fat (butter, which creates steam, which causes spread) in the shape you cut it. If you use a knife in a dragging motion, you’re creating a less defined barrier, and in many cases smearing the tiny layers of dough/butter/dough. The butter melts and the liquid fat seeps out into the surrounding dough, causing it to spread. Either way, if you cut the dough and then chill it completely before baking, you’ll have much better results!
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