Have you ever spent 20 minutes at the grocery searching for one item? This hasn't happened to me for quite some time as the grocery and I are BFFs; however, Friday night proved otherwise...
Upon looking over the recipe, I noticed that most of the ingredients were pretty common and thus, have most in my baking cabinet already. However, I was running low on sugar, eggs, and butter, and had not yet added vegetable shortening or Cream of Tartar to the mix... so it was off to the grocery for this Pint-Size Baker.
Once down the baking aisle, the sugar and vegetable shortening were a quick find. However, Cream of Tartar was no where to be found. Maybe I should've done a little more research before going to the store because I didn't even know what it looked like. It could have been a solid, a liquid, a powder type substance... I had NO earthly idea. After about 5 minutes of searching the aisle, I decided to go to customer service and ask for their helping in finding Cream of Tartar. "Excuse me, where can I find the Cream of Tartar?" I asked. "[With a little chuckle] You can find that down aisle 6, where the condiments are," the lady at the counter explained. So off I went down the aisle giving her the benefit of the doubt for knowing what Cream of Tartar was... yea that was a mistake. She thought I meant Tartar Sauce! After laughing to myself, I started back towards the baking aisle and ask a fellow customer if she knew what it was/looked like. She explained that it would be in with the spices. AH HA! That narrows it down significantly! Back in the baking aisle, I began to scan the 8374238472634 spices for Cream of Tartar... typically they're placed alphabetically, but I wasn't sure if it was under "C" or "T". There was another gentleman in the aisle not having any luck finding what he needed either, but I decided to see if he knew where it would be. He immediately goes "one second!" and went down the soup aisle. While he was in the other aisle, I ended up finding the Cream of Tartar on my own and then found him to let him know. Well, guess where he thought it would be... in with the Cream of Mushroom and Cream of Chicken soups... This was quite a start to the third baking adventure!
Ok enough story time... time to get down to business and let you in on what was on the agenda for this week's baking adventure...
If people don't know what these are, they're basically sugar cookies on crack! Buttery, cinnamon and sugar goodness! I would highly recommend baking these as they're super simple and very difficult to mess up if you follow the recipe. My biggest challenge in baking these was mixing and baking double the normal batch...
Why did I bake double you ask? Well, I had my FIRST PAYING CUSTOMER!!! :-D WOOHOO!!! In my ideal world, this little baking hobby would turnout to be lucrative at the same time. Who doesn't want to be paid for doing what they love? :-)
The first step in the process is always PREP. The ingredients are pretty minimal for these cookies and are mostly common, household pantry items. Please pay no attention to the vanilla extract in the picture below. It decided to jump in uninvited to the Snickerdoodle Cookie party. Bad Vanilla Extract, Bad!
The recipe calls for sifting the dry ingredients together in one bowl and blending the wet in another per usual. This was the easy part...
After the two bowls contain their corresponding ingredients blended together, it was time to add the dry into the wet. Well, if you're like me and don't have an electric mixer or anything besides a spoon and your hand, this is QUITE the workout and leaves a nice red hand afterwards.
Once the dry ingredients were combined with the wet, it's time for the fun part! Make little balls of dough and then roll them in the cinnamon and sugar, place on baking sheets and bake for approximately 10 minutes. A tip for the balls of dough is to roll them in between the palms of your hands (make sure you wash them) like you would making balls of play-dough when you were little, and then place in the cinnamon-sugar and take a spoon and spoon the cinnamon and sugar on and around the dough. Try and minimize the amount of time your hands/fingers touch the cinnamon and sugar as you will start to stain the raw dough, and with these cookies, it's important not to blend those two parts together.
This recipe is supposed to produce approximately 4 dozen cookies (or 48 total), but since I was doubling the recipe, I ended up rolling, cinnamon-sugaring, and baking 106 total cookies!!! Needless to say, I got a great workout and my kitchen and apartment were quite toasty when done! In fact, the apartment thermostat said 81 degrees when I was finished and it was on 74 when the adventure began.
After the cookies were cool, I packaged up 48 of them for my paying customer and put the rest in my regular tupperware to share with family and friends. Then it was off to deliver the Snickerdoodles to the paying customer and watch my Irish kick some football butt!
That's it for this week folks, please leave comments below OR if you want to be my SECOND paying customer, please inquire within! ;-)
Next week's adventure has already been determined and I can't wait! One of my best friend's has shared one of her favorite recipes with me, so next week will be a dedication to her and her shared love of baking!
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Yay! Can't wait for next week's adventure :)
ReplyDeleteAnd don't worry about the Cream of Tartar dilemma, I know all too well as I had a similar experience. I've since learned that there's no real need for it other than to add a bit of tart flavor to your treats. I've left it off some of my recipes and they've been fine.
~Meredith
My mother explained to me that Cream of Tarter is a leavening agent, like baking powder, with a little different taste. I think it is worth it to hunt it down. If left out, you could end up with flat, "spread-out" cookies. I just read your review on the msn delish website. Good way to advertise! Oh wait you are in marketing, so I'm sure you know all about it.
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