What Happens If You Add Too Many Eggs To Baked Goods?

Eggs are an essential ingredient in many baked goods, including this recipe for brownie buckeye cookies or this chocolate cake with green tea confection. Both the yolks and the whites serve a purpose, influencing the flavor, texture, and even the lift of cakes and cookies. But if you're experimenting to create a new recipe or modifying an existing one by increasing the number of eggs, you might not like the outcome. Food Republic spoke on this topic with Marissa Stevens, recipe developer and food blogger at Pinch & Swirl, and she told us, "Too many eggs can make baked goods rubbery or overly firm."

She continued by saying that eggs help provide structure and richness, but only when a fine balance is achieved with fat and flour. "I've seen cookies come out oddly spongy when people add an extra egg thinking it'll make them softer — it usually backfires." She also described how, in delicate batters such as sponge cakes or shortbread, it changes the texture and flavor too much. You can tell you've added too many eggs to the dough while mixing if it's overly tacky, and you might fix it by adding a bit more flour to balance it — a few tablespoons per extra egg. Be sure to make a note on the recipe for next time so you don't replicate the mistake.

However, extra eggs won't ruin every baked good. "There are exceptions," explained Marissa Stevens. "An extra egg yolk can add richness to custards or pound cake." Where a chocolate chip cookie recipe might call for two eggs, you can add an additional yolk there, too, and end up with a final product that is specifically chewier (who doesn't love a cookie that is pliable and bendy?) and more flavorful.

Stevens also told us that some cake recipes with a denser texture, like flourless chocolate cake, can actually "benefit from the extra structure." Not only do the yolks provide fat that works in tandem with the sugar, the whites — which tend to get whipped in flourless cake recipes — help the cake rise. Though the structure does eventually fall, the protein in the whites also helps create that delightfully crackly surface (like the best of brownies). Audrey Hepburn's favorite flourless cake recipe has an aggressive amount of eggs — so try adding a few extra to your next flourless cake bake and see if it doesn't come out richer, moister, and with a satisfyingly crisp surface texture.