Adventures in Baking: Snickerdoodles

A couple weeks ago I was thinking to myself how I wanted to start baking...just for the sake of baking and experimenting. Then last week Jeff mentioned how he missed the snickerdoodles from the coffee shop he used to work at. *lightbulb*

So Sunday I decided to look for a good snickerdoodle recipe,and got to work. My go-to recipe resource is All Recipes. What I love about it is that you can go through the comments, and see how people improved on the recipe, or read suggestions they have, or read a heads up on what to avoid or do differently. For someone who does not have kitchen common sense, I getting these little pieces of practical advice from people who have tried the recipe before. This is the snickerdoodle recipe I used, although I'll write it out with the suggestions I found helpful.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup butter, softened (let it soften by leaving outside of fridge for a while, do not microwave)
• 1/2 cup shortening
• 1 and 1/2 cup white sugar
• 2 eggs (room temperature)
• 2 tsp. vanilla
• 2 and 3/4 cups all purpose flour
• 2 tsp cream of tartar (if you want fluffier cookies, use 2 tsp. of baking powder, which is what I used)
• 1 tsp. baking soda (make sure your baking soda is still good--test it by placing some in water and making sure it still fizzles) (is "fizzles" a real word?)
• 1/4 tsp salt

For coating:

• 3 tsp sugar
• 3 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

Instructions

• Preheat oven to 375
• Mix all dry ingredients together; mix all wet ingredients together (hand mix, do not use a mixer)
• Mix both dry and wet ingredients together

• Use spoon to measure out small balls, shape until you have used all dough

• Mix the coating ingredients in a ziplock bag
• Roll each ball in the cinnamon mixture

• Place parchment paper on cookie sheets, and place coated balls about 2 inches apart

• Bake for 8 minutes; remove immediately from cookie sheets

I had a lot of cinnamon coating left over. I think that's because I made my cookies too big, and therefore there were less of them to coat than what the recipe called for. They still turned out uh-mazing.