How to Make Snickerdoodle Cookies

Video Transcript

"Snickerdoodles are the classic cinnamon and sugar topped cookies. I'm Karen Lasher with "Around the Table" in Camas, Washington and I'm going to show you how to make snickerdoodles. First we are going to start with a cup of butter and one and a half cups of sugar. Whenever you use butter in baking you always want to use unsalted butter. You never know about the sodium content, it various from types of butter. You want to be able to add it yourself. So I have already creamed the butter here and what you want to do is add your butter and it should be soft. It should to be soft to the touch but not, you shouldn't be able to completely squish it. It still should have some permanence to it. So I'm just going to cream that a little bit longer and it just gets nice and blended and then we are going to add two eggs. Eggs when you are baking should always be at room temperature so before you start to bake pull out your butter, pull out to soften, pull out your eggs to come to room temperature. So we have added our eggs and we are just going to mix that a little bit more so that combines well and you want to run it until you really get it until it is combined into a nice and you can see that it is all mixed together well. Now before we move forward we are going to scrape down the side of my bowl. Now here I am using a mixer for this task and I would recommend that whenever you are making a recipe that involves creaming butter and sugar a mixer really is the best task. You can use a hand held mixer will work quite fine and you could do it by hand although it will be quite a work out so if you are in for a work out you can do it as well. Then we are going to take in this bowl I have added all my dry ingredients. I have got flour, baking soda, cream of tartar and a little bit of salt. Make sure that you mix this well together before you add it to your wet ingredients. So this is all mixed and then we are just going to add it to the bowl here and bring up the mixer. Now when we do this we are going to start very very slow because the flour will have a tendency to fly all over the place and we don't want that and then when it gets going you can let it mix well together. This is one of my favorite cookies and I think part of it is because it just has such a fun name, snickerdoodles, it makes me think of my mom who used to make some really wonderful snickerdoodles. So once that is mixed we are going to remove it and we are going to make small little balls. Try to get all of your dough, you don't want any dough left on your beater because that doesn't make any cookie and get all that and I like to use, you can use your hands or a little teaspoon to make your scoops and it really doesn't matter what size, the size is really going to just dictate how long you are going to have to cook your cookies, how long you are going to have to bake them so you either are going to make little tiny snickerdoodles that are just bite size little morsels or you can make the big monster cookies. So here I've got a scoop an ice cream scoop and I even use this to make my, it just makes a much faster process. I can do a lot of cookies really quickly with an ice cream scoop. It is also sort of a trick in a professional kitchen you will use a scoop because of its consistency, you know that every single time you are going to have the same size cookie. Now when I am putting it here on the tray the first time I really just am doing this to get them on there because the second part of it, the fun part of it is we are going to roll it in cinnamon and sugar. So in a bowl here I have some cinnamon and sugar mixed up, two tablespoons of sugar to two teaspoons of cinnamon. At my house I just keep a big container filled in the cupboard with cinnamon and sugar so we can sprinkle it on toast and it is always ready. So then you are just going to take your balls and just roll them in your cinnamon and sugar and this is now why I am going to spread these out on my cookie sheet. These are going to be big, wonderful, good size cookies, perfect for a hungry teenager. So I put these cookies on a parchment paper lined cookie tray. Now parchment paper is you can find in any grocery store and it's a great thing to have to make cookie baking easy and for a lot of different things. You can also just use a regular cookie sheet that doesn't have the parchment on it and just have an ungreased cookie sheet. We are going to bake these at 375. These are a little bit larger cookies so these are going to bake for about 10 to 12 minutes. The recipe would make two dozen normal regular sized cookies. It is not going to quite make two dozen of this size. So again 375 always check your cookies a little bit sooner than what it calls for because you don't want to over bake them. You always can add more time. Alright so here are our snickerdoodles that have come out of the oven and they are nice and brown on the bottom and wonderful but still you can tell they still are wonderfully soft on the inside and they are going to be wonderful. Now you can add when they first come out of the oven you can add a little extra cinnamon or sugar on the top for added cinnamon sugar. I like to leave mine just plain this way. Enjoy."