Best cookies ever made by a human hand.

My favorite cookie in all the world is the Snickerdoodle.



Funny name, serious cookie.

I love these so much, our wedding cake was a Snickerdoodle cake (and yes, it was amazing). I haven't made Snickerdoodles in a long time, but yesterday I thought it would be nice to try a new recipe I had seen forever ago. Be warned: this recipe will create a Snickerdoodle so good, that once eaten, your body and mind will never be the same, and all cookies thereafter will pale in comparison. Think you can handle it? Good.



This recipe is called "Mrs. Sigg's Snickerdoodles" and can be found at AllRecipes (which is a site I highly recommend for all your food/recipe needs):

INGREDIENTS
1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup shortening
1 1/2 cups white sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons cream of tartar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons white sugar
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon


DIRECTIONS
1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C).
2. Cream together butter, shortening, 1 1/2 cups sugar, the eggs and the vanilla. Blend in the flour, cream of tartar, soda and salt. Shape dough by rounded spoonfuls into balls.
3. Mix the 2 tablespoons sugar and the cinnamon. Roll balls of dough in mixture. Place 2 inches apart on ungreased baking sheets.
4. Bake 8 to 10 minutes, or until set but not too hard. Remove immediately from baking sheets.

This recipe makes 48 cookies, but can be easily halved.. but why would you want to do that?



Tips: To make coating the dough less messy (and faster), put the cinnamon/sugar mixture in a ziploc bag and shake, one or two at a time. You may wish to use 3 Tablespoons sugar and 3-3.5 teaspoons cinnamon. Also, bake for 8 minutes exactly and remove the cookies from the baking sheet immediately. For creaming, make sure your ingredients are all about room temperature. If your butter is cold/hard, do not microwave it to soften it. Instead, grate the butter into the mixing bowl and let it sit for a minute or two before adding the shortening etc. If your ingredients are too warm or too cold, it won't cream right, meaning you won't get the proper amount of air bubbles needed in order to make it light and fluffy.

Also, be careful when removing the cookies from the baking sheet, as they're still young and impressionable. Like this one. It had so much promise. Don't let your cookie become another statistic.