The Effects of Using Different Fats on the Diameters of Cookies

Abstract

In this study, we investigated the effect of different fat sources on cookie diameters in baking. We conducted five controlled experiments that adopted cookie recipes with vegetable shortening, coconut oil, butter, sunflower oil, and margarine to collect diameter measurements for cookies baked using different fats. We calculated the mean and median values for each dataset, and visualized the experiment's results using side-by-side box plots. A statistical analysis using a one-way ANOVA test and a Tukey’s HSD test were performed for all of the cookie diameter data to compare and determine any significant differences between the groups. We found all of the resulting groups to be significantly different from each other with vegetable shortening versus margarine being the only exception, which supports our hypothesis that using different fats when baking cookies will affect the diameters of the resulting cookies. Lastly, we discussed the limitations and any possible source of error that may have influenced the experiment.