Sarah Kieffer's book
100 Cookies includes two recipes for snickerdoodles -- a regular version and a pan-banging version. I decided to try the pan-banging one. It's actually identical to her pan-banging sugar cookie recipe, except that the snickerdoodles include nutmeg and are rolled in cinnamon-sugar before baking, while the sugar cookies are rolled in plain sugar.
To make the batter, you beat room temperature butter with sugar until light and fluffy; add an egg and vanilla; and incorporate the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, salt, cream of tartar, and freshly grated nutmeg). You form the dough into balls (I made a batch and a half of dough, which yielded 11 cookies formed with a #12 scoop, plus four cookies formed with a #16 scoop), roll them in cinnamon-sugar, and bake them on foil-lined baking sheets, banging the pan periodically during the last half of the baking time.
As my cookies were in the oven, the thought popped into my head that it was odd the recipe doesn't include cream of tartar, an ingredient typically included in snickerdoodles. Then I looked at the open cookbook on the kitchen counter and realized that the recipe does in fact include cream of tartar, but I had simply failed to add it. I had also inexplicably forgotten to add the nutmeg. I have no idea why I apparently spaced out when making the recipe and omitted these two ingredients, but I got a strange sense of déjà vu, because I also accidentally omitted the cream of tartar when I recently made Shauna Sever's
Frosted Snickerdoodle Bars.
Luckily, my cookies were none the worse for the wear despite missing both the cream of tartar and nutmeg. They looked great and tasted great too -- chewy and sweet, with lots of cinnamon goodness. The cookies in the photo above were formed with a #12 scoop; I preferred these very large cookies to the slightly smaller ones formed with a #16 scoop because the bigger cookies had more rippling. It's true that these cookies seemed more like sugar cookies rolled in cinnamon-sugar than snickerdoodles because they were so thin -- but then again, all pan-banging cookies are quite thin, so I'll be curious to see how making this recipe as written affects the texture, and if adding the cream of tartar makes them more snickerdoodle-like. Kieffer's pan-banging sugar cookie recipe also calls for cream of tartar, so it's not unique to her snickerdoodles.
I've really liked all of the pan-banging cookies I've tried so far, so I'm definitely to try this recipe again, as well as the pan-banging sugar cookie recipe. These cookies were great even with my errors, so if the actual recipe produces a better cookie, I'll just consider that a bonus!
Recipe: "[Pan-Banging] Snickerdoodles" from 100 Cookies by Sarah Kieffer.
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