How to Fix Cookie Dough That Is Too Dry
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Have you just made a batch of cookie dough that crumbles in your hands when you go to form it, because it is too dry? Well, don’t give up hope. There’s probably a logical reason for that, and a logical solution, too.
It’s all about achieving balance among dry ingredients, liquid ingredients, and fat. Your dough either lacks the correct amount, or else it has too much of a good thing. Mixing and storing of the dough also are important factors to be considered. We’ll investigate each of these, one bite at a time.
Dry Ingredients
You might have too much dryness in your mixture due to measurement error. Not to worry. We’ve all made that type of mistake!
Even a small deviation can result in imbalance. That’s why many recipes are written in grams or ounces rather than cups, and why pastry chefs invest in kitchen scales to ensure consistency. (One cup of flour equals 130 grams.)
But even if you measured correctly, there could still be too much dryness due to evaporation in your home. Flour, cocoa, and other dry substances can be affected to some extent by the environment in which they’re stored.
If you live in a dry climate, your dough may be dry because the flour and/or another dry ingredient has lost some of its natural moisture. Believe it or not, flour contains moisture, and not enough moisture in your flour can cause your cookie to crumble.
Here’s a table that shows relative humidity in various environments:
Environment | Relative Humidity |
Average Home | 20-80% |
High Desert | 0-20% |
Rainforest | 80-100% |
According to one source, in both extremes (high desert and rainforest) flour’s weight due to moisture loss or gain can fluctuate by 6% or more.
Solution: Correct the lack of moisture in your dry ingredients by adding some fat back into the recipe.
The best way to do this is to pour a small amount (1/4 to ½ teaspoon) over the dough and knead it in with your hands. Then cover it with waxed paper or plastic wrap and refrigerate it for about 30 minutes. The fat should be well-incorporated by then.
And if you tried skimping on sugar, try adding some of it back in. Sugar adds moisture. Just think of what it looks like when it melts.
Liquid Ingredients
Perhaps your dough is dry due to an insufficient amount of a liquid such as milk, vanilla, water, or egg. It may still be possible to incorporate a little more liquid into your mixture.
In addition, the type of flour you’ve used can drastically affect how much liquid you need to balance it. The more protein in your flour, the more liquid it will absorb, and the stronger (and drier) the dough will turn out. For example:
Type of Flour | Typical Percentage of Protein | Result |
Cake flour | 10.0% | Softer, lighter dough |
All-purpose flour | 11.7% | Average dough |
Bread flour | 12.7% | Stronger, more elastic, drier dough |
Solution: Try carefully sprinkling about ¼ teaspoon or so of water over the dough, adding in more as necessary, and combining everything using your hands. You may need to add up to 1 to 2 teaspoons of additional water for each cup of flour in your recipe.
Many recipes assume you are using large eggs these days. If the problem is that you used small or medium-sized eggs instead of large eggs, crack one more egg, beat it, and gradually add in whatever amount is necessary.
Are you covering your dough with plastic wrap to keep it from drying out while you’re working with the rest of the amount? If not, you should give that a try.
Fat
Fat softens the dough, helping it to hold together while making it pliable. The right type and amount of fat are crucial to producing a soft cookie dough that retains its shape.
Using margarine in place of butter can cause dryness since margarine contains less fat than butter does. But don’t despair if you suspect the problem has to do with not enough fat.
Solution: You can try adding a little melted butter or good vegetable oil such as canola to your dough. Fats that are liquid when they are at room temperature, such as cooking oil, will likely keep your dough more supple.
Mixing
Over-mixing can cause dough to dry out by exposing it to air longer. More importantly, it will increase gluten formation. Gluten helps bind ingredients together, but it also can make your product hard and dry.
Solution: If you’ve over-mixed, the solution is to try adding liquid or fat in very small amounts until a better consistency is obtained.
Next time, try mixing the recipe gently with your hands instead of using an electric mixer and see if it turns out any differently. Sometimes this results in a better texture, and you’ll be able to know immediately if it needs adjusting.
Storing
How have you stored your dough while waiting to form it into cookies? Have you refrigerated it for too long a time? Ten minutes is fine, but more than this can sometimes dry out the dough.
Solution: If your dough has been refrigerated and it’s either too dry or too cool, you can try making it more flexible by placing it in a warmer location, free from drafts.
Other Considerations
In addition to the above factors, other things to take into account include how you are working with it during the final step: shaping it into its final “look.”
If your dough is sitting in the bowl but you can already tell it’s going to be too dry to form into little balls or other shapes, try letting your dough sit on the counter at room temperature for ten to fifteen minutes. If that doesn’t do the trick, then the answer is to try adding more fat or liquid back into the mix.
If you’re trying to roll the dough out flat with a rolling pin but it keeps cracking, it’s possible that you’ve got too much flour on the rolling surface. You could try refrigerating it first before rolling. That way, you may not need to add a lot of flour to the rolling surface. A floured surface will absorb liquid from the dough.
Always start in the center and roll away from yourself, turning the dough a bit now and then to keep the thickness even.
Another possible fix if your cookie dough is cracking when you try to roll it out is to use parchment paper between the dough and the rolling pin to keep it from sticking and separating.
Or perhaps the rolling pin itself is the problem. A rolling pin with handles might be causing you to put too much pressure on one side or the other, making your tender dough crack under the pressure.
A French rolling pin does not have handles and allows you to place more even pressure all along its surface. And a marble rolling stone is a good investment as well.

If all else fails, why not try compressing the dough into a tube shape, wrapping it tightly with plastic wrap, refrigerate it for several hours, and then slicing it into nice, evenly shaped rounds? It’s certainly worth a try. Slice and bake cookies are fun to make.
Uses for Dry Cookie Dough
What if you’ve tried the above solutions, but your cookies turn out dry and crumbly after you’ve baked them despite all your efforts?
Well, a perfectly acceptable “fix” for dry cookie dough is to put it to better use as a non-cookie. It’s just like turning lemons into lemonade, except that the result is a lot sweeter!
Here are some great ways to use up dry cookies, and not a single one of them is “crummy.”
- Pulverize them in the blender and use them in pie crust recipes for key lime, chocolate cream, banana cream, or coconut cream pie.
- Crush them and use them as toppings for ice cream and puddings.
- Chop them up and add them to homemade brownie batter.
- If you haven’t already baked the dough, you can even use the raw dough as pie crust. Just press it evenly into the bottom and sides of a pie plate, prick it all over with a fork or weight it down with pie weights, and bake it just as you would for cookies. When it’s done, fill the pie with fresh fruit and cover it with glaze to make a tantalizing fruit tart, or fill with ice cream, top with whipped cream, and slice it into wedges.