The differences of using white sugar, light brown sugar, or dark brown sugar when baking a chocolate chip cookie recipe

Abstract

Sugar is an essential ingredient when baking that not only changes the flavour of a baked good, but also affects the overall texture, color, volume, and tenderness. The difference between white sugar, light brown sugar, and dark brown sugar is often overlooked and many people will interchange the three without realizing just how drastically it can affect the results. The objective of this experiment is to investigate the impact of using the three types of sugar in a simple chocolate chip cookie recipe on the final size (diameter, height) and observed color and texture. I predicted that the white sugar cookies would be the thinnest and largest in diameter, while the dark brown sugar cookies would be fluffiest and smallest in diameter, and the light brown sugar would be in between the two. Two one-way ANOVA tests were run on Microsoft Excel to
statistically analyze the data to see if differences existed between the mean height and mean diameter of each type of cookie. P-values of 0.00001 were determined for both the mean height and mean diameter across the three types of cookies, and since this value is less than the significance level of 0.05, the null hypothesis was rejected stating that there is no difference between the sugar types and cookie sizes. It was found that white sugar cookies were smallest in height and largest in diameter, dark brown cookies were largest in height and smallest in diameter, and light brown sugar was in between which aligns with the initial predictions.