whine & dine

The first time I’d heard of snickerdoodles was sometime early this year. It was on some food blog or other (sadly I can’t remember where I originally saw this whimsically named cinnamon-sugar encrusted cookie), and I was hooked. I mean, c’mon. They’re called snickerdoodles – how can that be a bad thing?

Long story short: I completely forgot about them, having neglected to pick up a jar of ground cinnamon on any of my supermarket runs. (Bunny isn’t a fan of cinnamon, so I don’t use it all that often.) That is, until Deb of Smitten Kitchen posted about them. This time, the pictures were so gorgeous and so tempting that I pretty much immediately ran out to citysuper to get supplies, and boy were they good.

For one, the entire house smelled heavenly. I mean, it tends to, when you’ve got little bombs of sugar and butter and cinnamon in the oven. And it took so much self-control to not eat them as I pulled each snickerdoodle off the baking tray and onto the cooling rack. They were the perfect mix of crisp-edged and chewy on the inside.

It’s taken me long enough (about 3 more batches have since been baked in between) to post about them, but now that I have, it’s your duty to make some. Your sweet-toothed, cinnamon loving friends and family will love you all the more for it, and, because they keep for about a week when wrapped air-tight, they’d probably make the perfect Christmas gifts. No prizes for guessing what my friends will be receiving this year – which reminds me, I’ve gotta get baking! :)

PS: Merry Christmas everyone!

Snickerdoodles
(From Smitten Kitchen)

2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons cream of tartar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
8 oz unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 3/4 cups sugar, plus more if needed
2 tablespoons ground cinnamon, plus more if needed
2 large eggs

Preheat the oven to 200°C, with one rack in top third and one rack in bottom third of oven. Line baking sheets with silicone baking mats or parchment paper.

Whisk together flour, cream of tartar, baking soda, and salt to evenly mix and aerate then set aside. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, cream the butter and 1 1/2 cups sugar on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 4 minutes. Scrape down sides of bowl. Beat in eggs, one by one. Add dry ingredients, and mix on low speed to just combine. Chill the dough for at least one hour (or overnight) in an airtight container to facilitate scooping.

Once the dough has chilled, in a small bowl, combine remaining 1/4 cup sugar and the ground cinnamon. The original recipe says to use a small ice-cream scoop to form small balls of dough, but I found it much easier to weight out 20g pieces of dough and roll them into small balls with my hands. Roll them in the cinnamon sugar, and arrange about two inches apart on the prepared baking sheets. Bake until the cookies are set in center and begin to crack (they will not brown), about 10 minutes, rotating the baking sheets halfway through. Transfer the sheets to a wire rack to cool about five minutes before transferring the cookies to the rack.

Yield: I didn’t count (and, also, many of the finished cookies disappeared into waiting and eager mouths once they came out of the oven…) but I think I made around 4 dozen 2 to 3-inch snickerdoodles.