On Wednesday I realized that I had never made snickerdoodles. My first response upon this epiphany was "who cares?" But, in an attempt to resist my typical desire to stick with something familiar that I make all the time, I decided to go for it. I was bored. I was uninspired. What other cookie could so perfectly complement these emotions?
And so commenced The Great Snickerdoodle Adventure (eh, still just sounds like a bad joke.)
I referred to a recipe from The Cookie and Biscuit Bible by Catherine Atkinson (I have to cite this stuff, right?), a magnificent book gifted to me by a magnificent Camila.
The original recipe called for chopped walnuts, which I replaced with some ground almonds. I also substituted nutmeg for some of the cinnamon, as I ran out of cinnamon. In conclusion, they would have been better with no nuts at all. Duh.
Snickerdoodlezzzzzz
* 1/2 cup butter (1 stick), room temp
* 1/2 cup sugar
* 1 tsp vanilla
* 2 eggs
* 1/4 cup milk
* 3 1/2 cups flour
* 1 tsp baking soda
* 1/4 cup ground almonds
topping:
* 5 tbsp sugar
* 1 tbsp cinnamon
* 1 tbsp nutmeg
Preheat oven to 375˚.
Cream the butter and sugar. Add eggs and vanilla and milk. Add flour and baking soda and mix.
Mix in the almonds/walnuts/skip this step until it resembles this:
For the topping, mix the sugar and cinnamon/nutmeg in a shallow dish. Roll the dough into balls and roll them in the cinnamon sugar. I savvied up slightly after the first round of cookie shaping and rolling and took a more aggressive approach to coating the cookies. I found the really smashing them into the cinnamon sugar and attacking all sides (yes. sides of a ball.) in order to achieve optimal coating. Needless to say, the second batch was infinitely more... coated.
Place and cookies on a lightly greased cookie sheet and flatten slightly. Actually, flatten more than slightly as they don't really do any flattening on their own. For round 1 I ended up opening the oven mid-bake and pressing all the cookies down with the back on my wooden spoon in order to make them sufficiently flat. I would not recommend following this step. Those cookies turned out looking pretty ugly.
Bake in the preheated oven for about 10 minutes. In an effort to be less of a control freak I did not time the baking process, but I would caution that the cookies were a bit dry at the end, so underbaking is advisable.
Cooling on a rack is unnecessary, but if your mother is lurking nearby it is generally a good idea to use the rack in order to avoid being nagged.
Lastly, unload as many of these as you can on your friend(s) so you don't end up stuck with 30 mediocre cookies.
Or make tea and serve them to your parents.
Addendum: After writing this, I proceeded to go downstairs and finish the remaining cookies. I can't say for certain if this is a reflection on snickerdoodles or on me, but make of it what you will.
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