Sunday 12 January 2014

Adventures in Baking || Snicker Doodles


So, one of my non-bookish goals for this year was to try out a new recipe every week or so. I really love baking especially, and Pinterest has really helped expand my entrée repertoire. To make things even better, one of my friends gave me a cookie page-a-day calendar for Christmas. So there's lots of new recipes to try!


Snicker Doodles from Cookie-A-Day Calendar/500 Cookies

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp cream of tartar
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup butter
3/4 cup + 2 tbsp granulated sugar
1 egg

Mix flour, cream of tartar, baking soda and half the cinnamon together in a bowl, then add the salt.
In a separate bowl, beat the butter and sugar (less 2 tbsp) together. Add the egg.

Combine dry ingredients with the butter mixture and mix to a smooth paste. Wrap the dough in parchment and refrigerate for about 30 minutes, or until firm.

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Mix together remaining sugar and cinnamon. Shape dough into small balls and roll in the cinnamon sugar.

Place the balls at least 2 inches apart, as the mixture spreads to produce a thin cookie. Flatten each cookie slightly with a fork. Bake for 10-12 minutes. Cool for 5 minutes.

Makes 2 dozen.


Okay. So, let me just tell you about all my adventures with this recipe. Phew. It was not as straightforward as I thought.

First, I had a hell of a time finding cream of tartar because I'm an idiot and didn't know what I was looking for. Thankfully, my parents let me borrow some.

Second, I apparently can't read and added 1 cup of sugar instead of 3/4 cup. Whoops. I also didn't bother with the parchment covering. I just put saran wrap over the bowl and refrigerated the whole thing for a little under an hour.

Third, this recipe completely understates how much this dough spreads while cooking. No seriously. Just look at this!

With any other recipe that would've been a dozen neatly spaced cookies. (Okay, 13, I tried to sneak an extra one on there, look how well that turned out.) The balls I rolled were reasonable in size and I managed to get 26 out of the dough instead of 24. But these cookies are gigantic and paper thin!

I smartened up and cooked the remaining 13 in two batches, but MAN. I was not expecting that!

It makes me think that you could roll the balls even smaller and get nice little baby cookies out of this deal. You'd definitely have to reduce the cooking time though, because 10 minutes was almost too much. I ended up going for about 8.5 minutes when I cooked them six at a time. 

Despite their less than ideal appearance, they're still tasty though. So that's something.

Overall, I'm sort of disgruntled with this recipe. But I'll probably hang on to it and might try it with the benefit of experience. Maybe it won't be so bad.

Ease: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Taste: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆