Bad News: I’m going through a breakup. It’s no fun but the good news is I’ve been eating REALLY well! ‘Cause if there’s one time I find myself extra obsessed with baking, it’s when I’m going through a breakup. What can I say, maybe my heart really is made out of sugar and spice and that’s why I need to eat so much dessert to fix it when it breaks. Needless to say I’ve been eating my way through a number of feelings lately, and it seems my heart has chosen cookies as the official medicine for this breakup.
I’ve also been watching a bunch of cooking shows on Netflix as a distraction and the other night while I was polishing off a bowl of cookie dough ice cream (still on theme) I decided to watch the first episode of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, which is the episode all about fat. If you haven’t watched it yet I cannot recommend more highly that you do because Samin Nosrat is a vision and so is a travel food show starring a woman of color in the supremely white dominated culinary industry! It will make you smile and drool and want to spend way too much on plane tickets and artisan food items. I finished that episode about how fat enhances food and all I wanted was all butter everything. I’ve since made salmon in a lemon butter sauce, ribeye finished with rosemary garlic butter, mushrooms sautéed in buttery white wine sauce over linguine, and most importantly, these cookies.
The meeting place of my newfound love affair with butter and my heart broken cookie craving plus a dash of still caring about it being fall is this snickerdoodle cookie recipe. I’ve always loved snickerdoodles specifically because the best ones taste like sweet and salty butter with cinnamon on top. That’s it. So, that’s exactly what these taste like. They’re incredibly soft, warm with cinnamon, and oh my lesbian heart the butter. When you eat them warm it melts onto your lips and fingers in the most perfect way. So lickable, so luxurious. You need that experience, I promise you do. There’s also something unconventional about my snickerdoodles: their size. I make them really thin and light cause otherwise they’re a little too rich. This way you can eat cookie after cookie after cookie with no problem cause they’re so dainty and delicious, a quality that makes them perfect in general but especially for the heartbreak club. I’ve truly felt better with every bite. What broken heart?! They also take less than 30 minutes to make so you can have these butter-laden cinnamon spiced dream cookies to go with your coffee or hot cocoa in no time. Oh, and even though it goes against snickerdoodle tradition, I won’t tell if you coat them in pumpkin spice seasoning instead of just cinnamon. ‘Tis in fact the season!
Ingredients:
1 2/3 cups (160g) all purpose flour
1 teaspoon cream of tartar
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 1/2 sticks (157g) unsalted butter
1/2 cup (100g) plus 3 tablespoons (37g) granulated sugar
1/4 cup (50g) brown sugar
1 large egg, room temperature
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 teaspoons ground cinnamon
Makes 2 dozen cookies
1. Preheat the oven to 375°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone mat and set aside.
2. In a medium sized bowl, whisk together the flour, cream of tartar, baking soda and kosher salt then set aside.
3. In a large bowl or the bowl of a stand mixer cream together the butter, 1/2 cup of granulated sugar, and the brown sugar until light and fluffy, Next, add the egg and vanilla extract and mix until combined. Finally pour in the dry ingredients and mix just until the dough clumps together then mix by hand with a spoon until all the flour is incorporated.
4. Scoop out chunks of dough about a tablespoon in size and roll into little balls, then place on the cookie sheet.
5. On a small plate whisk together the remaining sugar and the cinnamon. Now start rolling the little dough balls in the cinnamon sugar sands of happiness.
6. Place them all back on the baking sheet, 12 per pan with lots of room to spread, and bake for 8-10 minutes till the edges have JUST started to brown. They’ll still be soft and light in the middle.
7. Remove from the oven and immediately transfer to a cooling rack. This is the scary part cause these cookies are super soft and easy to break when they come out. Just take your time and don’t stress! A broken cookie is still a delicious cookie just like a broken heart is still a beautiful heart.
8. Eat all the snickerdoodles your queer heart desires, whatever state it’s currently in.
I saw the picture and thought they were fried green tomatoes. Weird how much they look the same, even though the cookies are thinner. That being said, I can’t wait to try this recipe.
I’m so sorry to hear about your breakup! I am a firm believer in therapeutic baking, and this looks like an excellent recipe for it. Here’s hoping for sweeter
days.
thank you!! really appreciate it :)
Reneice this is so sweet and comforting!! ? I hope your broken heart is mending a little more every day
thank you! it is, one bite at a time haha.
Definitely a believer in cooking/baking away heartache and blues! I made pumpkin pecan biscotti last night, ginger cookies earlier this week, and a hug in a bowl bacon and leek risotto. I’ll have to make these next
wow that biscotti sounds AMAZING, and I’ve never heard of hug in a bowl risotto, what?!
I like your approach of baking to deal with a break up, it seems like a good time to make something positive. I always wondered what a snickerdoodle was and now I’m excited to try making them for the first time!
It’s pretty much the only approach I know! Lots of baking to keep me distracted, and lots of eating baked goods in the bath to keep me calm haha.
I don’t see a flour amount listed. I have read the list several times and don’t think I’m just blanking on flour…
I just updated it! Thanks for catching that. A little absent minded these days :)
::therapeutic baker high five::
These cookies look amazing! Thank you for helping me live my best ‘all butter everything’ life. :)
yes! all butter everything life ?
I just fell in love with the name (never heard it here in Germany) and they sound very delicious!!! May your heart mend soon with a little help of butter and cinnamon. I firmly believe they have strong healing power.
Oh no, Reneice! Big hugs! ❤❤❤
I went to the store yesterday and I’m really bummed that I forgot to get eggs because I would otherwise be making these right this moment. Snickerdoodles are one of my very favorite cookies and you’re right that they’re very rich! Making a more stackable size cookie is inspired!
I woke up and opened autostraddle (as i usually do when i wake up on weekends). Saw this recipe and said “i know what I’m gonna do today”. These just came out of the oven and let me tell you, they are PERFECT. Thank you soo much for such an amazing (and delicious! They’re so good and buttery like you said! I love them!) recipe and I’m so, so sorry to hear about your breakup. But I’m sure with cookies like this your heart will be mended before you know it.
(I’m honestly in love with these cookies I can’t even explain it. SO GOOD. AND SO EASY TO BAKE. AMAZING.)
How might these be if I substituted allspice for the cinnamon? I’m thoroughly allergic to cinnamon. Any other spices that might work well with the butter/sugar/salt matrix?
I’ve been making snickerdoodles a lot lately and I think on my next try I’m going to test out a powdered ginger/sugar mix? I’m a freak for ginger and I have a feeling it might be amazing. No data on it yet tho ?
Absolute strumpet for spices and food allergy sufferer chiming in:
If you’re going to try subbing with allspice use 1 to 1 and 1/2 teaspoon allspice cause it’s much stronger than cinnamon is.
Now I’m going to give some more radical flavor suggestions; using 1 tsp ginger with the allspice is one, it’s not a part of the cinnamomum genus at all. The other suggestion makes me feel like I’m stepping on Reneice’s toes a bit.
Substitute the 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract for 1/4 tsp maple extract you’re not allergic to maple, or 1/2 tsp almond extract if you’re not allergic to almonds.
The wildest suggestion I have is 1 tsp allspice, 1 tsp ginger and 1/4 tsp fenugreek.
Fenugreek is a spice I’d call an enhancer, you can’t pick it out as a flavour but everything tastes better when it’s added.
I call it a wild suggestion because I’ve only used it in savoury dishes and I think I remember seeing in a cookie or sweet pastry recipe but I can’t remember the name of the item or the region it was from and trying to look for it have only encountered hippie-dippy bo-ho recipes that make my eye twitch.
As a Brit, and someone who always has trouble converting recipes from the US units of cups, sticks etc., THANK YOU for including weights of the ingredients. I’ll definitely be baking these, they sound delicious!
Did anyone else read this recipe in the morning, think about it all day and then finally decide to make them at night only to get grams confused with millilitres and mistakenly use half a cup of flour resulting in extremely oily and wet cookies that would not set but then have a nice bonding experience with their dad where together they mixed more flour into the already baked cookies and now are eagerly awaiting the results?
Every day it becomes more apparent to me why I nearly failed chemistry in high school.
Anyway, this has been a fun experience. Thanks for the recipe, Reneice! ❤️