Snickerdoodles

This a no-fail cookie recipe. Like you literally can' t go wrong with these (provided you follow the recipe!). They're sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, forming a slight crust that gives way to a soft interior. They are my friends' favorite, hands down- normally they find some way to complain about anything I make (ohh, boys), but these they just eat. I remember I took them to Brad at school once, and as we sat in his dorm talking I watched our friend Phil quietly eat almost every single Snickerdoodle I'd made (Brad was not pleased, but I was!)

If you're having a casual gathering, want to bring something into the office, or just have a craving for something sweet, I highly recommend these! They also freeze well, so they are good to keep on hand.

Bear in mind that the dough needs to chill for 8 hours, so it's wise to spread the baking over 2 days. Additionally, just so you know, the recipe makes a lot of cookies (like 50).

Snickerdoodles (From Carole Walter's Great Cookies)
2 and 1/2 cups flour
2 tsp cream of tartar
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temp
1/2 cup vegetable shortening (don't substitute)
1 and 3/4 sugar, divided into 1 and 1/2 and 1/4 c
2 large eggs
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon

Strain together flour, cream of tartar, salt, and baking soda. Set aside.

In the large bowl of an electric mixer, cream the butter and shortening on medium speed until lightened in color. Add 1 1/2 cups sugar in a steady stream, and mix another two minutes.

Reduce mixer speed to low and add the eggs, one at a time, mixing after each addition. Stir in vanilla.

Add the dry ingredients in 2 additions, mixing until just blended. Scrape dough into a clean bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let chill for 8 hours or overnight.

When ready to bake, position the shelves in the upper half of the oven, or in the middle and bake only one sheet at a time (that's what I do. In my oven, anything on the bottom rack tends to burn so I just do it one cookie sheet at a time, despite the fact that I have double ovens). Heat oven to 350 and line baking sheets with foil.

Combine the 1/4 cup sugar and cinnamon. Scoop pieces of dough about the size of walnuts and roll into a ball, then roll in the cinnamon and sugar. Place 3 inches apart on baking sheet, and bake for about 10 minutes.

Remove from oven when they are golden brown around edges (they'll look a bit puffy, but will deflate as they cool, creating perfect, homemade looking cracks). Let cool for 5 minutes and then remove from foil and set on cooling racks.

These cookies will last 3 weeks if stored airtight. And trust me, everyone will love them!! Make these!

Dough Temperature: Chocolate Sugarsnaps

Baking cookbooks frequently extol the importance of proper temperature ingredients- very cold butter, room temperature shortening, etc. As any baker knows, those are critical. Butter that's too soft creates thin, greasy cookies, butter that's too cold doesn't whip enough air in, warm egg whites whip more volume, and so on. Knowing these types of things is what helps a recipe succeed, when it may not have worked for others.

But what about dough temperature? Is that as critical as the ingredient temperature? At some point or another I'm sure we've all been racing through a recipe we plan to serve later that day only to be confronted with the words "Chill dough overnight." Ahh! Guess we didn't read through the recipe carefully enough. Now what?

I've always wondered how important chilling overnight really was. Can I do it for two hours and call it a day, especially if i split the dough into smaller chunks? Do I really have to chill at all?

So I did a little experiment. This is by no means scientifically sound or even remotly exhaustive. But I thought it was interesting and so I'm sharing my results. This recipe for Chocolate Sugarsnaps called for 30 minutes chilling time. I said to myself, how can that possibly do anything? So I prepared two baking sheets full of cookies. One batch went in the oven and and one was chilled as required.

And you know what? It made a big difference! Check out the picture at the top of this post. The cookies on the left are the ones that weren't chilled. They came out flatter and spread more, while the other cookies had a better, more visually appealing puffier shape. The taste was similar, save for a slightly more greasy feel on the unchilled batch.

I shared these results with my best friend Jenn and she told me she always chills her dough or cookies before baking them, even if the recipe doesn't call for it. So I think I'll be doing that in my next few recipes.

And of course I'll post the recipe here that I used for the sugarsnaps. It's a chewy sugar cookie dough flavored with quality chocolate and rolled in a coating of granulated sugar. I found these delicious (and I am not really a chocolate person), but I'll warn you of something I've noticed over the years: people just don't seem to gravitate towards chocolate colored cookies. I've made these, sables (which were AMAZING), and chocolate white chocolate chip cookies, and I always am greeted with the same reaction: "Those cookies don't really look that good. Yeah they taste good, but I don't know. The look is kind of unappetizing." Maybe that's just my group of friends though. Anyway the point there is, know your audience! They're really delicious but if you have a group that's picky on looks, well, you might want to stick to regular sugar cookies!

Chocolate Sugarsnaps, adapted from Carole Walter's Great Cookies

1 cup flour, spooned in and leveled

2 tbsp Dutch processed cocoa powder

1 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 cup unsalted butter, slightly firm

1 cup granulated sugar, divided into 2/3 and 1/3

1/2 lightly packed brown sugar

2 large eggs

1 tsp pure vanilla extract

10 oz fine-quality bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, melted

Strain together the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt. Set aside.

In the large bowl of an electric mixer, beat the butter on medium speed until creamy and lightened in color. Add 2/3 cup of the granulated sugar in a steady stream, mixing to combine. Add brown sugar and mix until smooth. Reduce mixer speed to low and add the eggs one at a time, mixing to blend and scraping the bowl as needed. Blend in the vanilla and chocolate.

Add the dry ingredients in two additions, and mix just until blended. Cover with plastic wrap and chill for 30-40 mins.

Position shelves to divide oven in thirds. Preheat to 375 and line baking pans with parchment.

Put the remain 1/3 cup of sugar in a plate. Shape the dough into walnut-sized balls and roll in sugar to coat. Place on sheets, 1 1/2 in apart. Bake for 8-9 minutes if you want your cookies chewy, 10-11 for crisper cookies.

Remove from oven and let rest for ten minutes, then use a metal spatula to transfer to cooling racks.

Stored airtight, these cookies will keep for 2 weeks.

Cookie Decorating

I dragged my boyfriend (from now on we'll just call him by his name, which is Brad) to Michael's with me the other day to pick up some last minute needs for my sugar cookie decorating. He was absentmindedly killing time in the aisles when he spied a bottle of white glitter sprinkles. Like a little kid, his eyes lit up and he said "Those would be really awesome on your cookies! You should get those." So I did.

And it completely streamlined my cookie decorating!

I'll explain. I tend to plan these really elaborate decorations for my sugar cookies. This year the game plan was snowmen with black hats, striped scarves, orange noses, and stocking cookies, decorated in a red and green plaid design. I plan the way to decorate these way in advance, and I always think they will come out as amazingly as the professional ones I find when image searching Google. I envision myself spending all day expertly and effortlessly piping decorations and impressing everyone who gets my cookie baskets...and I inevitably get frustrated after an hour, begin to thoroughly hate royal icing, and consequently scale way back on the intricacy of my designs, offering up plainer cookies or "accidentally" letting my dog get to a few.

And obviously, that happened again this year. Until I remembered the glitter sprinkles. Instead of making elaborate plaid designs on the stockings, I just covered them with my new stuff. So the cookies were easy to do, but since it was a cooler, more unusual type of sprinkle, they still looked better than a homemade piece of crap. I even scaled back the snowmen, but used sprinkles to add color to the hat and interest to the cookie's edge. So now it doesn't look so plain despite the fact that I skipped left out both the nose AND scarf.

So here's what I did:

1. Make a batch of royal icing (recipe follows).

2. Put it in a piping bag fitted with a plain tip.

3. Outline the tops of the stockings and the edges of the snowmen (stop underneath where the hat would be).

4. Press the snowmen into the white edible glitter.

5. Make a batch of glossy cookie icing (recipe follows). Fill in the snowmen and the top of the stockings. Press the stocking tops into the white edible glitter. Redip snowmen edges if need be.

6. Make a batch of glossy cookie icing and tint it red. Paint the bottoms of the stockings and sprinkle with red sanding sugar.

7. Make one last batch of very stiff black glossy cookie icing. Paint the snowmen's hats and pipe their eyes, nose, mouth, and buttons.

8. Use sprinkles to decorate the hats. (I used Christmas tree shaped ones turned sideways and little red ball sprinkles to create holly).

I use the two different types of icing because the meringue powder gives the royal icing a funny taste. So I use it only for piping or detail work.

Royal Icing:

1.5 tbsp meringue powder

3 tbsp hot water

2 cups powdered sugar.

Combine ingredients and beat with mixer until stiff peaks form, about 3 minutes. Can be doubled, tripled, etc.

Glossy Cookie Icing

1 tbsp corn syrup

1 tbsp water

2 cups powdered sugar

Combine all ingredients. To make stiffer icing, use more sugar and less water. To make thinner icing, add more water. Always err on the side of stiff, if icing is too watery it will run off cookie as it dries.

*To make whiter icing, substitute milk for water.

*Can also be flavored w/extracts

*If using food coloring, bear in mind that liquid coloring will dilute the icing. Paste or gel is preferable.

Enjoy your decorating!

Difficulty: 3

Sugar Cookies

What epitomizes cookies more than one shaped with a cutter and decorated with icing? I try to make these for every holiday, as they are my boyfriend's favorites (and he is a VERY picky eater, so once I find a recipe he likes I stick to it!)

In my quest to find the best rolled sugar cookie, I've experimented with many different recipes. I have found the absolute best is Neil's Scalloped Sugar Cookies, from Carole Walter's Great Cookies. They're super easy, delicious, made from ingredients you always have on hand, and don't puff up at all in the oven and ruin the cutter shape.

The other benefit to these cookies that they freeze & travel really well, and they also last about 3 weeks (stored airtight)- another reason they're great to make for the boyfriend- he's at school in Michigan!

This particular batch is going in my Christmas cookie tins. Every year, I obsessively plan the most efficient way to decorate these. That involves limiting myself to a minimum of shapes and colors. This year, as you can see from the picture, I went with snowmen and stockings. I'm going to use white, red, and green as my main colors, with black as an accent on the snowman. But my completely anal decorating method will be posted when I decorate them. Right now, they're being frozen away and will be pulled out closer to Christmas.

So, if you plan on making some Christmas cookies soon I highly recommend these. The recipe as I use it is as follows:

Neil's Scalloped Sugar Cookies

1 3/4 cups flour

3/4 cup confectioner's sugar

2/3 cup (1 and 1/3 sticks) unsalted butter, cubed and very cold

3 large egg yolks

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 or 2 tsp cold water as needed

Combine flour, sugar, butter in bowl of food processor, fitted with the steel blade. Pulse to combine, then process for approximately 10 seconds, until the mixture is the texture of fine meal (it will look crumbly and not much like dough).

Combine the yolks and vanilla in a bowl, and add to the processor's work bowl. Pulse to combine, and then process for about 10 seconds until a mass forms. If it looks very dry, add a tsp of water. Empty the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and shape into a disk. It will seem rather dry and crumbly. Don't worry.

Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 hour or up to 3 days.

To bake: Preheat oven to 350. Line cookie sheets with foil.

Working with 1/4 of the dough at a time, roll out on floured surface until about 1/4 or 1/8 inch thick. Using your cookie cutters, cut into your desired shapes.

Place on cookie sheet and bake for 10 to 12 minutes, until edges are golden brown.

**If you don't plan to decorate these, you can brush with an egg wash and sprinkle with sugar. I've never done that though, I always decorate with royal icing!

Difficulty Rating: 1