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Small, flat and sweetened baked food (biscuit)

A cookie (American English) or biscuit (British English) is a baked snack or dessert that is typically small, flat, and sweet. It usually contains flour, sugar, egg, and some type of oil, fat, or butter. It may include other ingredients such as raisins, oats, chocolate chips, or nuts. Most English speaking countries call crunchy cookies "biscuits", except for the United States and Canada, where "biscuit" refers to a type of quick bread. Chewier biscuits are sometimes called "cookies" even in the United Kingdom. Some cookies may also be named by their shape, such as date squares or bars. Biscuit or cookie variants include sandwich biscuits, such as custard creams, Jammie Dodgers, Bourbons and Oreos, with marshmallow or jam filling and sometimes dipped in chocolate or another sweet coating. Cookies are often served with beverages such as milk, coffee or tea and sometimes dunked, an approach which releases more flavour from confections by dissolving the sugars, while also softening their texture. Factory made cookies are sold in grocery stores, convenience stores and vending machines. Fresh baked cookies are sold at bakeries and coffeehouses.

In many English speaking countries outside North America, including the United Kingdom, the most common word for a crisp cookie is "biscuit". Cookies that are baked as a solid layer on a sheet pan and then cut, rather than being baked as individual pieces, are called bar cookies in American English or traybakes in British English Another claim is that the American name derives from the Dutch word koekje or more precisely its informal, dialect variant koekie which means little cake, and arrived in American English with the Dutch settlement of New Netherland, in the early 1600s. According to the Scottish National Dictionary, its Scottish name may derive from the diminutive form (+ suffix ie) of the word cook, giving the Middle Scots cookie, cooky or cu(c)kie. There was much trade and cultural contact across the North Sea between the Low Countries and Scotland during the Middle Ages, which can also be seen in the history of curling and, perhaps, golf.

Cookies are most commonly baked until crisp or else for just long enough to ensure a soft interior. Other types of cookies are not baked at all, such as varieties of peanut butter cookies that use solidified chocolate rather than set eggs and wheat gluten as a binder. Cookies are produced in a wide variety of styles, using an array of ingredients including sugars, spices, chocolate, butter, peanut butter, nuts, or dried fruits. A general theory of cookies may be formulated in the following way. Despite its descent from cakes and other sweetened breads, the cookie in almost all its forms has abandoned water as a medium for cohesion. Water in cakes serves to make the batter as thin as possible, the better to allow bubbles—responsible for a cake's fluffiness—to form. In the cookie the agent of cohesion has become some form of oil. Oils, whether in the form of butter, vegetable oils, or lard, are much more viscous than water and evaporate freely at a far higher temperature. Thus a cake made with butter or eggs in place of water is much denser after removal from the oven. Rather than evaporating as water does in a baking cake, oils in cookies remain. These oils saturate the cavities created during baking by bubbles of escaping gases. These gases are primarily composed of steam vaporized from the egg whites and the carbon dioxide released by heating the baking powder. This saturation produces the most texturally attractive feature of the cookie, and indeed all fried foods: crispness saturated with a moisture (namely oil) that does not render soggy the food it has soaked into.

Leah Ettman from Nutrition Action has criticized the high calorie count and fat content of supersized cookies, which are extra large cookies; she cites the Panera Kitchen Sink Cookie, a supersized chocolate chip cookie, which measures 5 1/2 inches in diameter and has 800 calories. The word "cookie" has been vulgar slang for "vagina" in the US since 1970. The word "cookies" is used to refer to the contents of the stomach, often in reference to vomiting (e. g., "pop your cookies", a 1960s expression, or "toss your cookies", a 1970s expression). "Cookie duster" is a whimsical expression for a mustache. Cookie Monster is a Muppet on the children's television show Sesame Street. He is best known for his voracious appetite for cookies and his famous eating phrases, such as "Me want cookie! ", "Me eat cookie!" (or simply "COOKIE! "), and "Om nom nom nom" (said through a mouth full of food). Cookie Clicker is a game where you click a cookie.