Recipe: Snickerdoodles
Snickerdoodles are old-fashioned American cookies that you can conjure from your oven in the blink of an eye (literally). Cinnamon, butter, flour: you probably have most of these things in your cupboard, and if you work quickly, you’ll have steaming cookies under your nose in fifteen minutes.
The silly name is said to derive from the German ‘snecken’, meaning snails – logical, right? The name and recipe were brought to America by German immigrants. But it could just as easily be a nonsense word, because apparently Mennonites and Amish – prolific bakers of snickerdoodles – got very creative when inventing names for their baked goods at the time. Today, the snickerdoodle is a hit; there are also snickerdoodle lattes, snickerdoodle-scented candles and snickerdoodle bubble bath.
What you need
• 125 grams (cream) butter
• 150 grams sugar
• 1 egg
• 200 grams flour
• 7 grams baking powder
• 4 teaspoons sugar
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
How to make snickerdoodles
- Let the butter soften outside the refrigerator. If you don’t have much time (or patience), put the bowl of butter in the microwave for ten seconds.
- Preheat the oven to 180 degrees.
- Beat the butter and sugar until white. The sugar will then be more or less dissolved in the butter.
- Add the egg and mix it in.
- Sift the flour and baking powder onto a piece of parchment paper. Add it all at once to the butter-egg-sugar mixture and mix together. The dough won’t form a ball, but it should be sticky enough to roll into balls.
- Stir the sugar and cinnamon together in a small bowl. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
- Shape the dough into balls the size of a walnut. Roll each ball in the bowl of cinnamon sugar until coated on all sides, then place them on the parchment paper, about five centimeters apart.
- Put them in the oven and bake for no more than ten minutes. The balls will melt, collapse and become flat discs. They won’t really brown and will only become firm as they cool. Let them cool on a rack and put them in a cookie tin.
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