A Tiny Trick for Making Perfectly Round Cookies Every Time
The little imperfections in baked goods are oftentimes what make homemade so great — the funny lumps and oblong shapes, the patch with too many chocolate chips or the part with too few — but sometimes you want your cookies to look like they came straight from the bakery. Whether that’s because you’re selling them at a school bake sale or posting them on Instagram, there is a time and a place for precisely round cookies.
So, what’s the secret? A popular tip taking over baking TikTok shows you exactly how to achieve that uniform look.
“Nothing in life is perfect,” says the voiceover in a recent TikTok video, “But you can definitely fake it.” As the cookies come out of the oven, the video shows a person using a biscuit cutter to reshape the cookies. Using a circular motion to push or swirl the cookie around inside the biscuit cutter, it gently bats the sides and neatens the edges out into a circle. “Perfect, uniform cookies,” concludes the voiceover.
Biscuit cutters are a tool we highly recommend having anyway, and not just for getting perfect cookies: You can use them to cut out biscuits, portion puff pastry to top chicken pot pies, and even for shaping pancakes and sandwiches (I’m looking at you, no-crust households).
The key to this trick is making sure the cookies are still hot — ideally just out of the oven — so they are still soft and pliable. I’ve seen other people on TikTok use things besides a biscuit cutter to shape their cookies, including an upside-down ceramic mug, although I think the biscuit cutter is ideal because you can see what you’re doing. Whatever you use for this trick, it’s important that it’s just a tiny bit bigger than the cookie itself. If the mold is too small or too big, it’s easier to damage the cookie.