Recipe: Extra Cinnamon Snickerdoodles

Sunday was mine and the boyfriend's turn to host Dungeons and Dragons for the month. That meant we needed munchies, and plenty of them. So naturally cookies were baked. I decided to take the opportunity to make another one of my favorite classic cookies for the blog. This time I chose snickerdoodles, a big hit among any crowd - especially the nerdy and hungry. Now I am a big fan of cinnamon, so for my snickerdoodles I add glorious amounts of extra cinnamon to the recipe. And by that I mean I bake an extra 3 teaspoons into the actual dough, as opposed to just rolling them in the cinnamon/sugar mix.

Ingredients

For cookie:
2 3/4 c flour
2 tsp cream of tartar
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
3 tsp cinnamon
1 1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter
1/2 cup shortening
2 eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract


For coating:
3 Tbsp granulated sugar
3 tsp cinnamon

Directions
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
2. In a small bowl, mix flour, cream of tartar, salt, baking soda, and cinnamon. Set aside.

3. In a large mixing bowl, beat sugar, butter, and shortening together until creamy with either a hand mixer or a standing mixer.
4. Add one egg at a time, beating between each egg until combined. Beat in vanilla extract.

5. Slowly add dry mix into the large mixing bowl, mixing thoroughly.

6. In a small bowl, combine sugar and cinnamon for coating.

7. Roll dough into 1 inch balls and roll them one by one in the sugar/cinnamon coating and place on a baking dish.

8. Place in oven and cook for 8-10 minutes (my second batch got a little over cooked at 10 minutes, but all ovens are created different so use discretion when baking).

Thoughts from the Boyfriend
Very sweet.

Recipe: Pecan Oatmeal Cookies

For my next recipe, I wanted to tackle another cookie basic and one of my personal favorites! Oatmeal cookies! (or as I like to call them, breakfast)

But there is one problem with most oatmeal cookie recipes that I bet many people agree with. Raisins are super nasty. Especially when you see a plate of oatmeal cookies, which you assume are oatmeal chocolate chip, and as you excitedly take a bite your mouth fills with raisiny grossness. The worst.

So my solution? Get rid of raisins. Who needs them? What I use instead are pecans. (For this reason I'm going to slap an ALLERGY WARNING: NUT INCLUDED IN RECIPE). So lets dive right in!

Ingredients
1 cup (2 stick) of soften butter
1 cup brown sugar (for extra sweetness)
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
3 cups oats (I personally use the quick oatmeal kind)
1 cup pecans, finely diced

(Featuring my mother's kitchen as guest kitchen. This is also my mother's recipe!)

Directions
1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F.
2. In a small bowl, combine together your flour, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt. Set it aside for later.
3. Beat butter, brown sugar, and granulated sugar in a large mixing bowl. Mix until creamy.
(I personally use a hand mixer for all of my cookie making, but if you are so lucky to have a standing mixer, feel free to use it.)
4. Add your eggs and vanilla next and mix well. Make sure its all incorporated in.
5. Now you can mix in those dry ingredients from before (the flour mixture). I recommend doing it a bit at a time to avoid a flour explosion, but that's just me.
6. Mix in your oats and pecans. This is going to get really thick so make sure to turn up your mixer a bit. Mix well so the oats and pecans are well incorporated with the rest of the dough.

7. Oatmeal cookies are drop cookies, so that means take a spoon and drop rounded tablespoons full onto your cookie sheet. These cookies are going to stay together relatively well and won't spread out a ton, but make sure your dough drops aren't more than a tablespoon.
8. Pop them in the oven for 10 minutes, then take out a cool on a wire rack. You're done!

And there you go! A much tastier and less deceiving recipe for oatmeal cookies. If you or your family are anything like me, they will be gone in a matter of hours. Perhaps minutes. I won't judge.

Thoughts from the Boyfriend:
Not bad!

Where I Get A Bit Philosophical About Baked Goods

My last post was my first attempt at making my own recipe. Not copying Martha Stewart or the back of the chocolate chips bag, but my very own, from scratch recipe. As I devised it, I got in my head the image of these beautifully round, plump, and chewy cookies that I could wow my coworkers with the next day when I brought the extras in. I was so excited as I dropped the dough onto the pans and slid them into the over. I waited anxiously for 10 minutes, staring at their baking forms through the window of the oven door. But I noticed something at about minute 5. My cookies were starting to look really flat. They were also huge! Not the little circular mounds of gooey-ness I wanted them to be. So I took the first batch out at 9 minutes, instead of 10. Upon hitting the air, the surface began to wrinkle and collapse in on itself. Disheartened, I put the next batch in for the full 10 minutes. This time, they came out dark and even more wrinkly then the last! For a few moments, I was completely devastated. Instead of the perfect little cookies I wanted, I had these weird, giant, wrinkled discuses of dough.

But then I took a bite of one. And hot damn it was good. Maybe I'm using hyperbole here. I don't care. They tasted great! It didn't matter if they looked nothing like I expected. They were cookies, and I made them. 100% on my own.

Let's face it. We've all had recipes that have...not gone quite as we expected. We search pinterest for hours trying to find the perfect dessert to bring to the staff meeting or the church bake sale, toiled over the mixer, using up the very last drops of our extracts, only to have the cookies come out of the oven looking like a toddler's play-dough modern art experiment. In short, bad. And it is absolutely soul crushing. No one likes to admit defeat and face failure, especially in an aspect of your life where you feel confident. it happens, and it sucks.

But it doesn't always have to suck. Baking is more than just aesthetics. When it boils down to it, taste is the most important aspect in whether or not a cookie - or any treat for that matter - is any good. I have eaten some beautiful treats before, where the baker toiled for hours to make each icing flower blossom identical to a real flower, or to make the fondant perfectly flat. But those treats often taste nasty! (like seriously, who likes fondant anyway?). I have also eaten treats thrown together in thirty minutes by my mom who just wants to have something yummy for after dinner. And those treats are delicious!

I guess what I'm trying to get at is, it doesn't always matter if one part of what you were doing doesn't fully meet your expectations. You just need to dig a little deeper to find the success. When it comes to baking, while appearance is important, the taste is what really matters. The deeper aspect of your endeavor. Your success that maybe you don't see at first. Don't hold imaginary expectations over yourself and presume every thing to be perfect. Sometimes you mess up and that's ok. Just keep trying! You'll surprise yourself sometimes. Maybe your awkward discus cookies are actually delicious.

Checker Chip Cookies

For my first post, I thought it only fitting to turn to the tried and true chocolate chip cookie recipe. However, the point of this blog is not to make the mundane, the over done, or the safe. It is for experiments. It is for new experiences. But above all, it is for really good cookies.

So instead of playing it safe, I decided to try something I've never done before: make my own recipe. I call them "Checker Chip Cookies".

The basics of the recipe are derived from your run of the mill chocolate chip. It is as follows:

Ingredients
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup butter (I stick), softened
1 1/2 cups dark brown sugar
1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs
Semi-sweet chocolate morsels AND white chocolate morsels

The and is very important (hence the underlined, bold text). It is the two types of chocolate that gives it the "checker" of its name. I also chose to use brown sugar instead of granulated white because this is my recipe and I like brown sugar. Really, there is nothing more to it than that. I just prefer brown sugar. Now on to the Directions!

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Do what you gotta do with your cookie sheets. You know them better than I do,
2. In a medium bowl, mix together flour, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.
3. In a large mixing bowl, beat together softened butter, brown sugar, and vanilla extract until creamy. Add one egg at a time, beating thoroughly after each egg.

I would like to take a minute to point something out before we continue. Most people are used to using either entirely white sugar, or a mix of the two in their recipes. Not many call for just brown sugar.

As we can see, the dough is a lot darker than "normal" before you add the flour mixture in. That is just because of the brown sugar. It is also super moist, once again because of the sugar. I chose to use 2 eggs because one was just a bit too dry, but if your feeling adventurous you could try to do just 1 1/2 eggs to make it a little less moist (but lets face it, that is unnecessarily difficult and not really worth the time).

Anyway, back to the recipe.

4. Slowly mix in dry materials from the medium bowl, adding a little at a time and then mixing. Repeat this process until it is fully incorporated.
5. Add morsels.
Now, the reason I did not measure out the morsels in this recipe is that I think you should do whatever you want when it comes to additives. However, I did a 1:2 ratio of white to semi-sweet, because I prefer semi-sweet. I used about half a standard sized bag of semi sweet and about a quarter of a bag of white. Its honestly up to you.
6. Drop onto cookie sheet in ball/piles about 1-2 inches around. I usually do them in 4x4 rows

(please ignore my weird temporary spice labels and misspelled "oregano")

7. Put in the oven for about 10 minutes. Take out and let cool, preferably on a wire rack.

And here they are!

Now dig in! You deserved it for taking the time to make those cookies!

Final Opinion

From myself: I was sort of disappointed that they did not come out thicker, but that is what trial and error is for. Overall, the texture and taste are good! I would gladly have these in my cookie jar.

From the boyfriend: Good! (he promptly ate two)