Novia’s Bakery in Tucson shares tips for baking cookies

You planned to recreate a gingerbread recipe you saw on TikTok, complete with elaborate icing decorations and bright smiley faces.

Unfortunately, we’re not all Martha Stewart.

In reality, our perfect Christmas cookies either turn out too brown around the edges with a thick cloud of black smoke following them out of the oven, or we scrape them from the pan because of the undercooked middle. The icing decorations look more like a puddle of colors mixing with each other and those bright smiley faces look more like a frown.

Now we’re scrambling to right our wrongs before the big man in red comes to town and no one wants to resort to the box of pre-made cookies that we know will sit in our pantries and collect dust.

Cookies are a crucial part of the holiday season and you deserve to serve sugar cookies that will make everyone who takes a bite cry with joy.

Step up your cookie game with help from Senovia Quihuis-Garcia, the baker behind Novia’s Bakery (noviasbakery.com), who shared with us her tips and tricks for ensuring your treats taste great. And it looks good.

Quihuis-Garcia has always had a passion for baking, teaching herself how to create delicious baked goods. She even landed a few restaurant and pastry jobs, including a stint at the now-closed B Line.

She later changed direction and ended up in a corporate marketing role, but grew tired of it. Instead of sitting behind a computer, she decided to quit and came up with the idea of ​​starting her own bakery from home. Thus, Novia Bakery was born.

At different local markets and cafes around town, you can find Quihuis-Garcia’s sweet and flavorful cookies, including her favorites like her brightly colored sprinkle cookies, homemade oatmeal cream pies and cochitos, its pig-shaped spice cookies.

“I really want to pay homage to the Mexican pastries and bakeries that I grew up with,” Quihuis-Garcia said. “I take a lot of inspiration from that, but also from childhood favorites, like Little Debbie snacks or things I would buy at the supermarket.”

This year, she’s going all out for her Christmas cookies. Red velvet snickerdoodles, Mexican gingerbread cookies, sprinkle cookies, peppermint chocolate chip cookies, and gingerbread cookies are just a few of the holiday-inspired items you can find on its menu.

While Quihuis-Garcia mixes unique ingredients and produces the cutest snowman and ornament cookies you’ve ever seen, it may be way too advanced for some of us.

If you’ve only used premade dough in the past and are looking to challenge yourself this year by baking holiday cookies from scratch, Quihuis-Garcia recommends starting with something simple like a cookie sugar or a classic chocolate chip cookie.

“They’ll taste good even if you burn them a little, they’re still very crispy,” Quihuis-Garcia said. “These are the best because you can decorate them with frosting and sprinkles, so it’s more of an activity as well as being a dessert. I would say even a chocolate chip would be easy too, it’s the same thing but with chocolate chips.

If you really want to make your chocolate chip cookies fancy, you can sprinkle a little sea salt on them for added flavor.

You might also be tempted to throw all the ingredients into a bowl and mix them together, but that’s something you want to avoid. Quihuis-Garcia said she first whisks the butters and sugars, creaming them together so air can enter. Next, you will want to add your liquids such as eggs, vanilla extract, milk, and any other similar ingredients. Finally, you can slowly add all your dry ingredients like flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

If you’re not using pre-sifted flour, Quihuis-Garcia suggests making sure to sift it before adding it to your dough, that way you won’t overwork your dough to get out those lumps.

Once your dough is ready, it’s time to put them in the mold. It is difficult to obtain perfect symmetry of each ball of dough every time; Sometimes you end up with very small cookies and other times you end up with a huge cookie that doesn’t bake all the way through.

To combat this, Quihuis-Garcia advises using an ice cream scoop or spoon to ensure your cookies all stay the same size.

“If you don’t have a kitchen scale, what I would recommend is just getting an ice cream scoop, or just using the same spoon and trying to get all your doughs to be about the size same size,” Quihuis-Garcia said. “That way, when they cook, they will all spread out pretty much the same way and they will all be about the same size as well.”

Now let’s move on to the trickiest part: cooking. It can be difficult to determine whether your cookies are underused or ready to be deleted. You can put them back for two minutes so that they are a little more golden and instead you will bring out a tray of dark cookies.

All this can be avoided with a few simple tips. First, Quihuis-Garcia says you want to make sure your oven is preheated to the temperature called for in the recipe. Next, you want to let your oven stay at this temperature for about 20 minutes before putting your cookies in. This way, the oven has time to really reach a temperature and, in turn, your cookies will bake evenly.

“You can have the best butter, the best chocolate, the best vanilla extract, all that, but if you burn your cookies or if they’re still raw, it doesn’t really matter,” Quihuis said- Garcia. “I would say, take the time and focus on baking your cookies perfectly.”

To ensure your cookies are baked evenly throughout, Quihuis-Garcia likes to check her cookies halfway through baking. She then rotates the mold and lets them continue cooking. Once she sees a nice golden color developing around the edges, she knows they are ready to be removed.

“Once you start to see some color around the edges, or, like, a golden color, that’s when I say, OK, it’s pretty much done, because once you take out of the oven, they will continue to cook,’” Quihuis-Garcia said. “You want them to almost look a little undercooked, or not quite there when you take them out of the oven, because once they sit on the counter, they’ll be perfectly fine.”

And just like that, you’ve done it! You survived the cookie baking process and ended up with round, soft, chewy cookies. All you have to do is decorate them as you wish and wait anxiously for a friend to take a bite.