2: Nigella Lawson's Snickerdoodles

A snickerdoodle is a type of sugar cookie made with butter or oil, sugar, and flour rolled in cinnamon sugar. Eggs may also sometimes be used as an ingredient. Snickerdoodles are characterized by a cracked surface and can be crisp or soft depending on preference. In modern recipes, the leavening agent is frequently baking powder in contrast with traditional techniques utilizing baking soda and cream of tartar. Snickerdoodles are often referred to as “sugar cookies.” However, traditional sugar cookies are often rolled in white sugar whereas snickerdoodles are rolled in a mixture of white sugar and cinnamon. The Joy of Cooking claims that snickerdoodles are probably German in origin, and that the name is a corruption of the German word Schneckennudeln (lit. “snail noodles”), a kind of pastry. A different author suggests that the word “snicker” comes from the Dutch word snekrad, or the German word Schnecke, which both describe a snail shape. Yet another hypothesis suggests that the name has no particular meaning or purpose and is simply a whimsically named cookie that originated from a New England tradition of fanciful cookie names.

I was surprised by how much I liked making these snickerdoodles from Nigella Lawson’s recipe in How to be a Domestic Goddess. I’m not very fond of heavy spices and if you put too much cinnamon in something, it is awful to try and eat it. I chose to make this one today on the 29th September after receiving a call back from the Job Centre that I didn’t succeed in getting the voluntary placement at Pitman Training, and I picked them because they were relatively simple to make and we had all the available ingredients. They are sweet, crisp, soft on the inside, and lightly spiced - a wonderful, almost Christmassy aftertaste.

Ingredients
250g plain flour (or 225g plain four + 25g cocoa for chocodoodles)
Half a teaspoon ground nutmeg
Three quarter teaspoon baking powder
Half a teaspoon salt
125g butter at room temperature
100g caster sugar + 2 tablespoons for the cinnamon sugar
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon cinnamon
[Two baking sheets, lined or greased]

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Combine the flour, nutmeg, baking powder and salt and set aside for a moment. In a large bowl, cream the butter with 100g caster sugar until light in texture and pale in colour, and then beat in the egg and vanilla extract. Now stir in the dry ingredients until you have a smooth, coherent mixture. Spoon out the remaining sugar and the cinnamon onto a plate. Then, with your fingers, squidge out pieces of dough and roll between the palms of your hands into walnut-sized balls. Roll each ball in the cinnamon-sugar mixture and arrange on your prepared baking sheets. Don’t put too many on each sheet or too closely together as when they expand upwards and outwards, they may merge into larger splats! Bake for about 15 minutes, by which time they should be turning golden-brown. Take out of the oven and leave to rest on the baking sheets for 1 minute before transferring to a wire rack to cool. It should make about 32 according to the recipe, but I hadn’t the faintest idea of how large a walnut was, so I made them quite big and ended up with three rows of six round blobs, eighteen in total. They weren’t “obviously” underdone in the middle, although I did wonder; they were softer in the middle than on the very crisp outside.