Beat the ingredients together, drop dollops of batter onto a pan, and bake — making drop cookies couldn’t be easier, but following a similar process every time doesn’t guarantee that the treat will always turn out the same. Even with the same steps, you still need to use the proper ingredients. For moist drop cookies, make them with brown sugar.
No matter what type of sugar you use — be it coconut, white, turbinado, or granulated — your cookies will always turn out sweet. However, the texture may vary. If you’re a fan of dense, chewy drop cookies, brown sugar is the correct choice. Thanks to the molasses in the sugar, drop cookies get a moisture boost that elevates their texture. When it comes to light vs. dark brown sugar, the latter contains more molasses, resulting in cookies that are even softer in the center.
If you’re following a recipe that uses white sugar, like this traditional Sicilian almond cookies one, you can use a one-to-one ratio when swapping the white sugar for brown — just know that the cookies won’t rise as much and will have a chewier bite instead of an airy finish. Making brown sugar is superbly easy, so you can always whip some up in a pinch. Just mix 1 tablespoon of molasses with 1 cup of white sugar to make light brown sugar, or 2 tablespoons for dark brown sugar.
What type of drop cookies should you use with brown sugar?
Since the molasses provides an extra touch of moisture, you’ll only want to use brown sugar in recipes where that’s appreciated. For treats like butter cookies or sugar cookies, a crisp, crunchy finish is ideal. Instead, use brown sugar for treats in which a chewy bite is expected, like classic peanut butter cookies or gingerbread cookies.
On top of using brown sugar for cookies of a certain texture, it’s important to make sure their flavors align. Molasses has a rich, velvety taste that certainly elevates desserts, but can easily mask them, as well. Its flavor may be too dominant for lemon or Earl Grey drop cookies, but brown sugar meshes perfectly with traditional snickerdoodles or chocolate chip cookies.
Whenever a recipe calls for brown sugar, it’s most likely referencing the light version, but you can spring for dark brown sugar when you really want to bring depth to your dessert. With double the molasses of its lighter counterpart, dark brown sugar has an earthiness to it that’s best reserved for certain desserts, like brown butter toffee cookies.
