I’m not a baker by any stretch of the imagination, and I often make mistakes with the simplest of recipes. I freestyle a lot while I’m cooking, but doing so with baked goods could result in a disaster.

To conquer my fear of baking, and as a longtime lover of chocolate-chip cookies, I wanted to see what would happen if I made some common mistakes while making a batch from scratch.

To keep things even, I used the same recipe — the Nestlé Toll House chocolate-chip cookie recipe right off my bag of chocolate chips — for my trial-and-error project.

From overmixing the batter to using too much flour, here’s what happened when I made 10 classic mistakes while baking cookies.

Overmixing — or overcreaming, in baking-speak — resulted in a runnier batter. The fluidity made for a cookie that baked quickly and spread out more widely than a properly creamed batter usually would.

You could overmix the batter at any point, but overcreaming occurs when you’re combining the butter, sugar, and vanilla. I mixed the batter more than I should have both during the creaming stage of the recipe and after adding the flour.

As a result, the cookies came out light and airy, and I was able to taste the butter more prominently in this batch than in others. They turned a nice, even brown.

Using baking powder resulted in a chewy cookie — the kind of chewy where my teeth stuck together a little when I chomped down.

This batch was cakier than the first ones, and the chocolate had an almost chemical-like taste that gave the cookie a slightly artificial flavor.

The cookies weren’t bad, but they weren’t as enjoyable as the other batches. So if you make this mistake, know that it’s OK — they won’t be the best cookies you’ve ever made, but they also won’t be the worst.

Packing the flour — tapping the measuring cup on the counter or pushing the powder down with a spoon — will result in using too much. I added only a little bit more flour than I should have for this batch and found that they took slightly longer to bake.

I left them in the oven for about 10 1/2 to 11 minutes (others cooked in nine minutes), and they came out super fluffy. They were dry inside, but not at all dense. They weren’t cakey like the batch made with baking powder was.

The cookies wound up being nearly the size of my hand, and though their superthin, brown appearance initially made me think I had burned them, they didn’t taste burnt at all.

The entire cookie was crispy, but the chips stayed intact. Biting into them, I found that this cookie didn’t even stick to my teeth too much.

Ultimately, this method yielded my ideal cookie. If you’re also a fan of a crispy cookie, this variation is for you.

I dumped the flour, sugar, vanilla, salt, baking soda, egg, and butter into one bowl and then mixed them all together.

There were air bubbles everywhere, and the cookies weren’t so pretty. They were bumpy instead of cohesive, and it looked like there were tiny clumps of ingredients in them.

When I pulled them out of the oven, they had kind of melted out from the middle. Some actually looked quite beautiful and rustic.

They had a bite to them that was a little chewy but dry. An interesting effect of leaving out eggs was that I could taste the salt prominently. These were the saltiest cookies by far, but I had included the same amount as I did in the other nine recipes.

This batch was basically a tray of small cakes. They looked and felt like madeleine cookies, even on the bottom.

Not using enough sugar resulted in dry and bready cookies. They weren’t chewy at all, and they puffed upward in the center.

And though the flavor was good, I wasn’t able to taste the vanilla as much as I could in the others. Both the texture and the mouthfeel reminded me of a not-so-hard scone.

This batch of cookies was cakey in the middle, but also airy throughout, with crispy edges. They were yellow and slightly puffy in the middle, and brown and super thin around the perimeter.

Using too much butter obviously made the cookies buttery to the touch, and they were soft enough to crumble in my hands. The cookies melted apart in my mouth quickly too, and I could feel the air holes — which were prominent on the surface — on my tongue.

These cookies were most similar to the batch that included too much egg. These just puffed up differently — they had more of a muffin top.

But this batch tasted really good. I was able to identify the vanilla and enjoyed the classic cookie flavor that comes with it.

It was a puffy cookies that felt airy in my hand. The bottom looked the same as the cookie with too much egg: more like a madeleine than a chocolate-chip cookies.

I thought it was interesting how even slightly changing the amount of flour I used could drastically change my cookies. And I’m glad that I found my new favorite cookie (achieved by using a little less flour) through this experiment.

Some of these mistakes affected the cookies more than others, but let’s be real: If offered, I wouldn’t turn down any of them.