Kitchen Tip: Why We Dissolve Soda in Coffee

When we first tested Cry Baby cookie recipes, we wound up with flat cookies that were torn and had holes. We tried several different recipes, then realized the secret to perfect cookies was an old-fashioned technique--dissolving the baking soda in the coffee, rather than combining it with the other dry ingredients.

Baking soda must be activated by the presence of an acid and a liquid. Doing this kick-starts the soda into action and affects the structure of the final cookie. When we used the soda-coffee trick, the cookies held together nicely after baking, and the activated soda made the cookies rise just a bit faster. We found the final cookies to be crisp on the edges, yet moist in the middle.