Perfect for sharing: Snickerdoodles

’Tis the season for cookies, and every day till Christmas, Star journalists are baking a recipe from our extensive archives. Follow our holiday baking adventures here on The Star, or get the recipes first plus some inspiration for your inbox with our free Cookie Calendar newsletter. Sign up here.
Emily Fagan is a general assignment reporter. She once (accidentally) caught a microwave on fire and smashed a blender, but is working to rehabilitate culinary skills.
This recipe for old-fashioned snickerdoodles, first published by the Star in 2011, walks you through making a cookie that is crisp on the outside yet soft and cake-y in the middle.
As an impatient baker at the best of times, I was attracted to the relatively low effort and potentially high reward of this recipe: I already had nearly all of the ingredients in my pantry and the preparation time seemed like a breeze.
My first challenge, however, was hunting down the sole ingredient I didn’t already own: cream of tartar. Thanks to a tip from a friend, I found it without too much trouble — although paying $9 for something I only needed a teaspoon of did make me reconsider some of my life choices at the checkout.
Once in the kitchen, the baking went as smoothly as expected. This recipe calls for an electric mixer to blend together the ingredients — something that, as you might expect from a person who agonized over a $9 ingredient, I do not own. I also forgot to remove my butter from the fridge overnight to allow it to soften, but in the end it didn’t matter: I put the butter in the microwave for about 30 seconds to soften and then hand-mixed it with the sugar. It turned creamy and smooth in minutes, so don’t be afraid of taking back at least one job from the machines with the help of some ol’ elbow grease.
These cookies need only about nine minutes in the oven, which is really the ideal amount of time because the mouth-watering smell of cinnamon and sugar starts to fill the kitchen at the four minute mark. They cool quickly and travel well — perfect for sharing with others.
The cookies came out great, but I now own more cream of tartar than I’ll ever use.