The Reason You Should Use More Than One Baking Sheet With Cookies

Is there anything better than freshly baked cookies? Whether your go to cookie for baking (and eating!) is the snickerdoodle with its tangy bite, the classic sugar cookie, or a hearty and filling cowboy cookie chock full of tasty fillings, the aroma of freshly baked cookies alone will make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, with fond and nostalgic memories of your childhood. To say nothing of actually biting into those warm morsels of sweet deliciousness.

The only downside with freshly baked cookies is that there never seems to be enough of them, even if you don't have kids (or adults) with a sweet tooth in the house. The solution, of course, is to simply bake more cookies each time, which is a great idea, even if you're not prepping for a bake sale. More cookies equal more happiness! Except if you've ever made more than one batch of cookies only to have the latter batches come out less than perfect. Assuming you've used the right ingredients and followed all the directions correctly, the culprit could be your baking sheet, if you're only using one that is.

If you're baking cookies with butter in them, you need to use a cool baking sheet each time. That's because butter begins to melt once it touches a hot or warm pan, which will cause the bottom and edges of the cookie dough to spread out, leading to thin and unevenly baked cookies, explains Southern Living. In an extreme case, if you didn't let your baking sheet cool at all after removing the previous batch of cookies, your next batch of dough will spread so much that they will fuse together, warns Cook's Illustrated.

One solution is to let your baking sheet cool off sufficiently in between batches, but that could add hours to your baking time, depending on how many cookies you're baking. An even easier solution? Use more than one baking sheet. That way, you can swap them out in between batches and let them cool off, without having to add on unnecessary extra time. So, do yourself a huge favor and set yourself up for batch cookie baking success by grabbing a few more baking sheets to have on hand.