The Great Snickerdoodle Debacle of 2023

Gather 'round, kids, and I'll tell you a story about perseverance. Unlike the rest of this blog, it has nothing to do with environmentally sustainable food choices; I just needed to record what happened so that in the future, I can avoid some baking errors that I made today.

My first mistake was probably in answering the call put out weeks ago by the parents'/guardians' association at my backup dancer's school. Show the teachers some love, they begged, by contributing three dozen cookies to fill boxes we're giving them before the holidays. "Freshly baked," they added, smugly. No one will be shocked to learn that the people who signed up to bake cookies were 38 women and 3 men, as far as I could tell from their names, so why did I fall for this stupid gendered addition to my holiday to-do list? Sigh.

Now, I'm a veritable wizard when it comes to chocolate chip cookies, but they're not festive. And while I make terrific gingerbread and sugar cookies, I wanted to spare myself the added steps of cutting out and icing them. With the benefit of hindsight, this desire to save time now strikes me as very cute.

I remembered that at one point I'd made snickerdoodles with a cheerful red sugar coating and they'd turned out great, so I tried to find the recipe I'd used. Alas, it seems to be lost to history,* so I pulled out my trusty "Joy of Cooking", found a snickerdoodle recipe, and got to work. And that was my second mistake: attempting a recipe for the first time when the clock was ticking.

My third mistake was not looking for a specifically gluten-free recipe for snickerdoodles, and instead just using my gluten-free 1:1 flour where the recipe calls for regular wheat flour. Honestly, in my experience, this works at least 90% of the time for cookies and bars, and the flour may not have been my problem in this case. But for whatever reason, here's how my first batch came out:

What the?!

You don't need to have read more than a couple of my blog entries to know that screwing up is a key element of my personal brand, but failure was not an option here, because hell if I was going to be the reason that three dozen middle school teachers were missing a cookie in their dang holiday boxes. So in the spirit of experimentation, I kept making further mistakes.

Would the cookies spread less if I baked them directly on an unlined/ungreased cookie sheet? Nope.

Would they spread less if I chilled the dough before balling and baking them? That helped, but only a little.

Would it help if I made the chilled balls half as big? Nope.

Would it help if I baked the half-sized, chilled balls in a muffin tin so they'd have nowhere to spread? Noooo. Those results were...interesting.

By this point it was 4:35pm and half my dough was wasted. And I had evening plans. Was I seriously going to have to cancel them? Because of snickerdoodles, for pity's sake? In desperation, I went to the websites of local bakeries. One wouldn't open early enough in the morning. Another's "holiday cookie assortment" was out of stock, probably procured by moms smarter than me.

I tried adding more flour to the dough, and threw another tray in to bake. The timer went off, and here's where it got all Clement Clarke Moore: Away to the oven I flew like a flash, tore open its door and threw up my hands. The oven light gave a lustre of midday to objects below, when what to my wondering eyes did appear?

Not a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer, but an even greater miracle: four perfect snickerdoodles.

Only 32 to go!

I wish you to know that yesterday, a storm flooded my basement and I spent hours laboriously cleaning up that mess, but I think today's snickerdoodle debacle (snickerdoobacle) may have been more exhausting.

But good teachers are everything, and I'm thankful for the ones I have had and the ones my daughter has had. So, cookies.

And I know I said this post wasn't about eating less meat, but while you're here, check out my 200+ previous posts that ARE about that, because that's a way for you to fight global warming. And to all a good night!

*UPDATE as of June 2024: I found the recipe! See https://gomeatlessmarch.blogspot.com/2020/12/barley-stew-with-leeks-mushrooms-and.html