What the Hell Happened to my Cookies?

this classic image's time to shine
- Prepend a ! and it'll embed instead of just link:
  
  Never noticed the image icon to the left of the link could be clicked like that. Thanks.
  
  Op looks better
  
  Where penis
- What is wrong with the baking powder? Too much? Too little? Too expired?
  
  Usually cookies need baking soda, not baking powder. If they call for both, it's at least 2x baking soda. People mix it up and add baking powder instead of soda.
  Or if the cookie requires levening from the powder and it's expired, it will not rise and spread.
  Soda helps with browning and powder is for levening
- So, too much butter and something about baking powder?

Too much butter. Dough wasn't chilled. Oven too high. Cooked too long.
- This one bakes.

I don't really know what you did, but this site has 9 reasons why cookies can go flat.
Link
- That's a great resource, thanks!
- WTF is overmixed? What does this mean?!
  
  Shouldn't have mixed so much
  
  did you try reading the article?
  If you’re sure you used butter at the correct temperature, you may have accidentally ‘warmed’ your butter by mixing it with an electric mixer for too long.
  Many cookie recipes start by creaming together the butter and sugar – this is just to combine the ingredients.
  If you do this for too long, your room temperature butter will get super warm – and then you’ll face problem 1. all over again.
  
  Some recipes depend on the dough being mixed just until the ingredients are combined, and not any longer. Other commenters are saying that overmixing cookies can warm the butter too much. With some recipes, like muffins, mixing creates gluten chains that lead to chewey-ness and toughness. So in order to avoid that you stop mixing asap.
  Baking is a chemical reaction and the quantities, order, and methods really do have a huge impact on the result!

Best guess just by looking at the photo is too much butter and I'm guessing you didn't chill the dough before you baked them.
- I didn't chill the dough, though the recipe didn't tell me to and my wife said I didn't need to, so I'm thinking I over mixed it
  
  It's not a requirement i think, but it will shape up well and easier. You mentioned that only 1/4 did this, maybe it's due to uneven mixing? Did you use mixer for it or did you mix by hand? Maybe the butter isn't soft enough so it didn't mix well?
  
  I think it's maybe a little but of both of what you and Annoyed_[Crabemoji] said. From what I remember of baking, butter being not chilled enough will cause it to be too soft and cook out before the chemistry can happen and they deflate like that. But obviously, it's real tough to mix in chilled solid butter, so by the time you've needed it enough for it to incorporate, it's warm again. When I was in culinary school back in the day we'd bake in huge batches, obviously, so we'd use big ole mixers to combine the cold butter quickly with giant mechanical paddles that forced it to combine while still cold. But at home, if you have to mix by hand and you know that the butter isn't cold anymore you can definitely chill the cough before baking. I don't remember much from those days (I was never a baker, I was a line cook, but baking classes were required), but when I saw your picture my immediate thought from the dredges of 20 year old memories was "That butter wasn't chilled."

Everyone is telling you too much butter, but if this only happened to part of your batch, it's more likely you didn't scrape the sides of your bowl while mixing.
When mixing anything with creamed butter, especially, you need to mix about a third of the time, scrape all the sides and fold the dough, mix, scrape, mix, and do a final scrape/ mix/ fold by hand to make sure all the butter is incorporated.
Stand mixers have this problem more than hand mixers.
- This is the right answer, when using a stand mixer you want to keep the speed level low (after creaming the butter/sugar/milk) and scraping the sides down to ensure an even distribution of wets/drys. Chilling can help with maintaining a shape, but it's by no means mandatory. How did they taste? 😁

too much butter, not enough flour, not enough baking soda
- Yep! Turned soupy and didn't rise

If this isn't consistent across the batch, then I'd say you didn't mix the dough very well. Some of the gobs got a lot of extra butter.

Its the taste that's most important, as long as they taste good they can be a bit wonky.
- Most of them were fine, these were more like pralines or lace cookies though, and they are delicious like this

It's possible you didn't beat them enough, so there were large pockets of sugar, powder, flour, etc.
- This is what I thought as well. Creaming butter and sugar properly gives the cookie better structure and spread less.
  The butter also needs to be the right temperature before baking—chilling dough is sometimes needed. Also regularly scrapping the sides of the bowl while mixing is important to have a nice homogeneous cookie without gobs of dry flour or butter.
- This is my guess too

Too much butter and maybe an earthquake.

Well for starters, the top one looks like doge
- Wow, such baking

I guess they unionised :D

Did you use melted or soft butter? Did you refrigerate the dough before baking?
We would need to know more about the recipe and what you did while baking to know for sure
- https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/10813/best-chocolate-chip-cookies/ this is the recipe, I used softened butter
  
  It might be too much butter, but I think you're also light on flour. If you're using cups, make sure you scoop it a little over-full and then level it off. You can also try measuring if you have a kitchen scale.

YOU FORGOT THE CHOCOLATE
- I did not, they were in there... I should've used more though

Yup, that’s what happens when you make your cookies all different sizes and don’t properly space them out.

Looks like you baked them
- I certainly did that

Chill the dough first my dude and use shortening.

Try spacing them out farther and double-panning (cookie on parchment on pan on pan)
- Why two pans? I've never had to do that before.
  
  See how the bottoms of the cookies are darker than the tops? With a single pan, the pan heats up quickly and cooks the bottoms of the cookies faster than the tops (because metal is a better conductor of heat than air). With double-panning, this effect is lessened.
- Airbake pans are the shit. Eliminates the need for double panning.
  
  I never felt the need to double pan. Whatever that is.

They were victims of the "qwomp" spongebob sound effect.

"I'm only gonna have 3 cookies"
The 3 cookies I had:
- Look, you're absolutely right, but I made a ton more. This was only a couple

It might be an altitude issue, higher elevation can make cookies look like that. I found high altitude cookie recipes and they puff up nicely.

It reminds me of those horror movies where little creatures all merge together to form one large grotesque abomination. I bet they're tasty tho!
- They certainly are!

Would be good to crosspost this to !recipes@lemmy.world, or one of the other communities in the sidebar
a place to share recipes and cooking tips of your own or those that you’ve found and loved

I hungry! It looks quite appetizing compared to the pastries I made.

They evolved.

you probably put too much butter in the dough. 1 stick is half a cup.
- Sticks also come in 1 cup sizes, so don't just go by "stick" unless you know for sure what size of stick you have.
  
  Just. Use. Grams.
  
  So you're saying it's not just how you use it, but size matters too?
- The recipe called for a cup. I linked it somewhere else in the comments

Too much butter, my dude

You discovered the beginning spiral of a quantum singularity.