Recipe for Snickerdoodles Gone Bad (Last Installment in This Series)

My grandmother and my great aunt baked the best cookies I have ever tasted. Their generation (born before 1900) knew cookies! When I was a boy, one of the towering pleasures of attending Vacation Bible School was to line up in the cool church basement on a hot spring day and to be served two cookies prepared by my grandmother and by other women of approximately her same age. How they discovered the secrets of baking is beyond me, especially when I consider that they learned to bake in hulking iron stoves with ovens fired by wood and without thermometers.

My Grandmother

Who Survived the Flu to Give Birth to My Father

While I would have a difficult time choosing a favorite cookie, I could be forced to declare my grandmother’s sugar cookie the best of the best. All her recipes have been passed down to me. There are dozens of sugar cookie formulations. I have prepared several of them, but they do not produce the cookies I remember. I keep hoping that the special sugar cookies are hiding among the recipes, but I have not yet found them. I am beginning to think that my grandmother was so adept at making them that she needed no recipe.

My Great Aunt Margaret and My Grandmother

Who Learned to Bake Cookies on Iron Stoves

Now and then, a mistake in cooking yields a delectable surprise. I once made a blunder in a snickerdoodle recipe and wound up preferring the result. The ingredients (below) include more butter than the original recipe required. My error occurred when I was doubling the recipe; I doubled the butter and forgot to double the rest of the ingredients. (Yeah, I goofed when multiplying by two. Maybe you can deduce why I did not become a math teacher.) The extra butter causes the cookies to flatten, but they have a melt-in-your-mouth crumb that is delicate and delicious. I call them “Snickerdoodles Gone Bad”!

Ingredients

1½ cup butter softened at room temperature

1½ cups sugar

2 eggs

2¾ cups all-purpose flour

2 tsp cream of tartar

1 tsp baking soda

¼ tsp salt

2 tsp cinnamon and 2 Tbsp sugar combined

Directions

Mix at medium speed in a large bowl the butter, sugar, and eggs until light and fluffy (at least 2 minutes). Combine in a separate bowl the flour, cream of tartar, baking soda, and salt. Add these to the creamed mixture and blend them well. Refrigerate the dough at least 30 minutes. Preheat the oven to 375° and combine the cinnamon and sugar. Shape the dough into 2″ balls and roll them in the cinnamon and sugar. Bake the cookies for 12–15 minutes on an ungreased cookie sheet. The tops of the cookies will puff up at first then flatten. Creases will form, and the edges will brown slightly.