An Inner Baker Story

CinnaDoodle Cookies

My version of Snickerdoodles

I love cinnamon!

Unfortunately, my cantankerous gallbladder did not. Neither did it care for ginger, cloves, and nutmeg. Good news — no more gallbladder, so I’m ready to frolic in cinnamon!

Being mostly gluten-free (I am not a celiac and can tolerate some gluten), I wanted a cakey, cinnamony, gluten-free cookie.

My first thought was of snickerdoodles:

They’re easy and can be made with gluten-free flour. Only problem is the cookie itself traditionally has no cinnamon; the cinnamon is added as a topping with sugar, lots of sugar.

Captain Argentina is diabetic. He doesn’t avoid all sugar but he does try to limit it, just as I try to limit gluten. A cookie rolled in cinnamon and sugar — well, not the best choice for him.

Time to get creative. I read a dozen or more gluten-free snickerdoodle recipes and cobbled my own, which I call CinnaDoodle Cookies.

I made them today for the first time. Follow along with me and let’s see if this recipe is a keeper or a tosser.

Before I start baking, let’s talk about kitchens. Mine is small. My counter space is anemic. Here is a photo of the small space I use for baking before I get everything out of the way:

Our three other counter spaces hold a counter-top oven, coffee-maker, microwave, and dish drainer, leaving the one above as the only space easy to clear. But, even when it’s empty, the work area is small.

If you think a tiny kitchen is impossible to cook in, I wish you could have seen Captain Argentina’s mother bake, broil, roast, fry, sautee, and simmer in a kitchen smaller than most coat closets. Just standing in her kitchen made me feel claustrophobic! But, she managed — deliciously.

So, stop whining about space, and let’s get baking!

Ingredients:

1 1/3 cups of gluten-free or regular flour (I used King Arthur’s Measure-for-Measure Gluten-Free Flour)

1 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp baking soda (not in photo above — sorry)

1/2 cup of butter at room temperature

3/4 cup sugar and a little more

1 egg

3 to 4 tsp of ground cinnamon and a little more

350-degree oven

Cookie sheet sprayed with nonstick cooking spray or lined with parchment

Deciding to make these cookies was spur-of-the-moment and I didn’t have an hour to wait for the butter to reach room temperature, so I created room temperature in a microwave. And here’s how to do that:

Put 2 cups of water in a microwave-safe bowl and heat until boiling in microwave. Meanwhile, cut a stick of butter into pats and arrange in a single layer on a plate. Remove boiling water from microwave and put the plate of butter in its place. Do not turn on the microwave! Let the butter sit in the warm, moist oven for about 10 minutes. After 5 minutes, I flipped the pats over. Voila, room-temperature butter!

Can you see the difference? The cold butter is almost white and very firm. The warmed butter is more yellow and soft enough to make a finger imprint but not soft enough for your finger to sink into the pat.

Stir your dry ingredients together in a bowl. Traditional snickerdoodles do not have cinnamon in the dough but my CinnaDoodles do because I love cinnamon, and I’m not going to use as much on top of the cookies as the traditional recipes do. The amount of cinnamon you use here is your choice. I used 4 rounded teaspoons. Use less if you are not as fond of cinnamon. I actually think that next time I may use 5 teaspoons to make the dough even more cinnamony.

You can’t really tell from the photo below, but the flour mixture is a light tan color because of the cinnamon.

Next, put the 3/4 cup of sugar and the butter pats in a separate, larger bowl.

Beat with an electric hand mixer until creamy, about 2 minutes. Stop occasionally to scrape down the sides of the bowl.

Add egg.

Beat just until well mixed — 30 seconds should do it.

Add flour mixture slowly and beat on lowest speed for about 2 minutes until a soft dough is formed. Be sure to pause and scrape down the sides of the bowl.

Now, make a cinnamon-sugar mixture to sprinkle on top of the cookies. Again, I went light on the sugar and heavy on the cinnamon. Most of the snickerdoodle recipes I read called for the dough to be rolled in the cinnamon-sugar or for a teaspoon or more to be sprinkled on top of each cookie. Again, this all depends on your diet and your tastes.

Also because I wanted less sugar, I chose to form flat cookies, rather than balls, and I chose to sprinkle just a small amount of the cinnamon-sugar on each.

I only planned for 12 cookies because I wasn’t sure how this recipe would turn out.

Now a word about cookie sheets. My cookie sheets are a little battered and stained brown from baking accidents. I could use an oven cleaner to get the burn stains off the pans but I choose to leave them. Why? Because each stain is a memory, and they don’t affect the taste of what I bake. The pans are not dirty, just stained.

I bought these cookie sheets when I started baking with my grandchildren. We used them for cookies, oven French toast, homemade pizzas, french fries, and much more. There were plenty of accidents, like the time we forgot to put on the timer for our inaugural try at biscuits. The first batch was too charred to eat! A few cookies exited the over crispy brown. Some frozen french fries were forgotten and looked like burned sticks. But, we had fun, no matter what.

So, I’ll keep the stains and the memories.

I baked the cookies for 14 minutes in a pre-warmed oven set to 350 degrees.

Because I went heavy on the cinnamon on top of the cookies, they almost look burnt, but they aren’t. The cookie has a cakey consistency, which I like, and it’s not as sweet as traditional snickerdoodles.

And, yes, these are not what you would call pretty cookies. I don’t bake for appearances; I bake for taste. If you want pretty cookies, watch one of those cookie baking contest TV shows.

I think this recipe is a keeper.

© Dennett 2021