I've made a lot of snickerdoodles in my time, and most of the recipes I've tried have been fairly similar. There have been a few differences around the margins (like the addition of brown butter, or cream cheese... although there was that one time I made a snickerdoodle with bananas and walnuts), but I think people have a pretty uniform set of expectations for any cookie called a "snickerdoodle." So I was intrigued when I saw that Erin Clarkson of Cloudy Kitchen had developed a snickerdoodle recipe that includes salted caramel. Salted caramel?! That's something I never expected to see in in a snickerdoodle.
The salted caramel component is homemade. It's simply granulated sugar that's melted on the stove, cooked until dark amber, poured out onto a pan (I lined mine with parchment, not a Silpat), sprinkled with salt, and allowed to cool. You grind some of the caramel in the food processor and break up the rest into bits; I put it in a Ziploc bag and bashed it with a rolling pin.
To make the cookie batter, you cream room temperature butter with granulated sugar, dark brown sugar, and the ground caramel; add an egg and vanilla; incorporate the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, and salt), and stir in the salted caramel chunks. I used a #50 scoop to portion out the dough and I got 49 cookies that I rolled in cinnamon sugar. Instead of making my own cinnamon sugar, I used some Penzey's cinnamon sugar that I already had on hand.
While the cookies were baking, the chunks of salted caramel melted and in some cases formed misshapen puddles of caramel that leaked out of the sides. I tried to use Erin's "cookie scoot" technique (using a cookie cutter to nudge cookies into a nice round shape while they are hot from the oven), but the cookie cutter was sticking to the molten caramel. Instead, I used a nylon dough scraper to nudge the caramel into place and I ended up with pretty nice-looking cookies.
I don't think that someone just looking at these cookies would be able to identify the divots on top as being bits of melted caramel. But if you turned a cookie upside-down, the underside of each cookie had numerous clearly identifiable blotches of caramel. The caramel was firmly set but not difficult to chew, and the salted caramel flavor in the cookies was a prominent as the cinnamon-sugar flavor. To that end, this cookie did not conform to my expectation of a snickerdoodle, because the caramel seemed foreign. However, the caramel was delicious, as was the cookie. If I was looking for a pure snickerdoodle experience, my cookie of choice would be the Brown Butter Snickerdoodles from Baked Elements. But these cookies are a marvelous twist on a classic. Salted caramel is just so good.
Recipe: "Salted Caramel Snickerdoodles" from Cloudy Kitchen.
The salted caramel component is homemade. It's simply granulated sugar that's melted on the stove, cooked until dark amber, poured out onto a pan (I lined mine with parchment, not a Silpat), sprinkled with salt, and allowed to cool. You grind some of the caramel in the food processor and break up the rest into bits; I put it in a Ziploc bag and bashed it with a rolling pin.
To make the cookie batter, you cream room temperature butter with granulated sugar, dark brown sugar, and the ground caramel; add an egg and vanilla; incorporate the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, and salt), and stir in the salted caramel chunks. I used a #50 scoop to portion out the dough and I got 49 cookies that I rolled in cinnamon sugar. Instead of making my own cinnamon sugar, I used some Penzey's cinnamon sugar that I already had on hand.
I don't think that someone just looking at these cookies would be able to identify the divots on top as being bits of melted caramel. But if you turned a cookie upside-down, the underside of each cookie had numerous clearly identifiable blotches of caramel. The caramel was firmly set but not difficult to chew, and the salted caramel flavor in the cookies was a prominent as the cinnamon-sugar flavor. To that end, this cookie did not conform to my expectation of a snickerdoodle, because the caramel seemed foreign. However, the caramel was delicious, as was the cookie. If I was looking for a pure snickerdoodle experience, my cookie of choice would be the Brown Butter Snickerdoodles from Baked Elements. But these cookies are a marvelous twist on a classic. Salted caramel is just so good.
Recipe: "Salted Caramel Snickerdoodles" from Cloudy Kitchen.
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