The Resurrection of the Snicker Doodle

Behold the lowly Snicker Doodle, a cookie that deserves a place in the cookie Hall of Fame! My coworker recently gave me a copy of this recipe, and said I "had to make it!". I promptly filed the recipe away for future reference. (It was on the top of my pile of recipes to try - honest!) Not long after, I happened across the same recipe in our local small-town newspaper, and made another mental note. Now I really had to give them a try!

How can I best describe this holy trinity of butter, flour and sugar? Please, you owe it to yourself to experience them! This recipe is so simple, it's probably been overlooked hundreds of times as not being worthy of mention.

So, for the record:

Snicker Doodles

1/2 cup butter
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1 egg
1-1/4 cup flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cream of tartar
cinnamon and sugar (for rolling cookie dough in)

Cream butter and sugar. Beat in egg. Sift dry ingredients together and add to creamed mixture, stir.

Refrigerate one hour.

Roll dough into walnut-sized balls and roll in the cinnamon and sugar mixture.

Place on ungreased cookie sheet and bake at 400F for 10 minutes. Cool on wire rack.

Yield:  about 24 cookies.

My notes:

I used a scant 1/3 cup sugar and approximately 1 teaspoon of cinnamon to roll the cookie dough in. If you're picky like me and have a digital kitchen scale, each ball of dough weighed 21 g, and the recipe made 25 cookies. (Just putting that out there!) I use air-bake cookie sheets, for those of you not familiar with them, the cookie sheets are made of a double-layer aluminum; if the bottoms of these babies burn, well, it's 'cause the top is on fire. My first batch stuck to the cookie sheet a bit, so I lined the cookie sheet with parchment paper for the second batch. I took the cookies out of the oven while they were a bit "puffy"; they deflated while cooling, and this results in a tender, chewy interior. Since I find measuring butter using conventional methods not quite precise, with the introduction of my new digital cooking scale, I'm now measuring butter by grams instead of cups.

Here's a handy conversion:

2 cups butter = 454 g
1 cup butter = 227 g
3/4 cup butter = 170 g
1/2 cup butter = 114 g
1/4 cup butter = 57 g
1/3 cup butter = 76 g
2/3 cup butter = 151 g

Please give these Snicker Doodles a try!