Brown Sugar and Cinnamon Cookies Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What happens if you add too much brown sugar to cookies? ›

Brown sugar adds a beautiful color as well as a more complex flavor. They'll also make cookies chewier, softer, and thicker than white sugar. Adding too much can result in dark brown cookies. Adding too little results in paler cookies.

Brown sugar is often made by mixing white sugar with a small amount of molasses, giving it a tanned hue and wet-sand-like consistency. The sweet stuff comes in two shades: light brown sugar (3%–4% molasses) and dark brown sugar (6%–10% molasses).

Add a tablespoon of buckwheat honey to a cup of white granulated sugar. This honey is darker than orange blossom or wildflower honey and has a strong flavor much like molasses that will come through in the resulting sugar.

When you decrease the sugar in a cookie recipe, you won't just get a result that's less sweet. You'll get cookies that are harder, drier, crumblier, and spread far less. It was also interesting to note that decreasing the sugar also yielded 1 less cookie dough ball.

Brown sugar is a natural sweetener that comes from processing sugar beets or sugar cane plants. Most commercially produced brown sugar is made by mixing white sugar with molasses, giving it a distinct flavor.

Light brown sugar: Use 1 tablespoon molasses for every 1 cup sugar. Dark brown sugar: Use 2 tablespoons molasses for every 1 cup sugar.

There are two types of brown sugar: light and dark, and as expected, light brown sugar has less molasses content than its darker counterpart.

Brown sugar adds a rich, sweet, and nutty flavor to baked goods, desserts (and even some savory dishes, too). Molasses is the key element that distinguishes brown sugar from granulated sugar, and it's this ingredient that makes brown sugar shine in banana bread, gingerbread cookies, and scores of other recipes.

Raw sugars

Raw sugars like turbinado or demerara make great brown sugar substitutes, as their naturally light amber colors and mild caramel flavors are similar to the real thing. In most recipes, you can trade raw sugars for brown sugar in an even proportion without noticing much difference.

What can replace molasses? ›

If you don't have molasses on hand, you can combine white sugar with another liquid sweetener, like maple syrup or honey. Mix 1 cup of granulated sugar with 1 tablespoon of maple syrup or honey. While the flavor will be a little different, you'll still get that chewiness in your baked goods.

Brown sugar is actually a combination of granulated sugar and molasses, so it's a good substitute for molasses. While measurements may vary per recipe, you can generally replace 1 cup molasses with 3/4 cup packed brown sugar. Dark brown sugar will have a stronger molasses flavor than light brown sugar.

For example, you can add a little more flour, butter, or any other dry ingredients called for in the recipe. This can help dilute the extra sugar and bring the flavors back into balance [1]. Double the recipe: Another option is to double the rest of the recipe, excluding the sugar.

Other than that, the cookies made with light brown sugar spread a bit more, and the ones made with dark brown sugar rose just every so slightly higher.

This problem means it won't dissolve and mix evenly into your batter. When your baked goods come out of the oven, they're likely to have little brown sugar pellets. If you don't want this happening to your baked goods, it's important to soften your brown sugar before baking.

Using dark brown sugar when a recipe calls for light will give your final product a more robust taste and a darker color, and it might slightly affect the texture. Because acidic molasses reacts with baking soda, using dark brown sugar in place of light might cause a higher rise and/or a wider spread.