This Pastry Chef Trick Guarantees You’ll Have the Prettiest Cookies at Your Holiday Swap
When I worked at a café, I baked hundreds of cookies, muffins, and scones every week—enough to make even the most casual baker obsesses over the little details. One topic we bakers never tired of? How to get cookies to bake into perfectly round circles. We knew the variables: the type and amount of leavening, the temperature of the dough when it went into the oven, even the shape of the scooped dough (one pastry chef swore the bottom had to be completely flat for a perfect circle). But for all our talk, only one method ever proved reliable.
It came from a colleague who, while developing a cookie recipe, discovered that swirling a ring cutter around freshly baked cookies could shape them into neat circles. The key? Use a ring cutter an inch or two larger than the baked cookie, and do it immediately after taking the cookies out of the oven—while they’re still warm and barely set. Wait even a few minutes, and the cookies firm up, making it impossible to reshape.
Of course, taste always trumps looks. When I bake for myself, I couldn’t care less if my cookies are wonky. But if you’re baking for a special occasion—say, a holiday swap, bake sale, or gift basket—where presentation matters, this trick is a game-changer. It takes less than two minutes to shape all the cookies on a rimmed baking sheet, and the result? Flawlessly round cookies that look like they came from a professional bakery.
