While everyone else has already jumped aboard the pumpkin train, I decided to pay homage to my Canadian roots and make maple snickerdoodles. (For William Shatner! And Dan Aykroyd! None for you, Celine Dion.)
I combed the web looking for recipes, and finally settled on this version, because it made MORE maple snickerdoodles, which seemed more enticing than fewer snickerdoodles. (And I’ve just learned that typing the word snickerdoodle is even more cumbersome than saying it.)
In addition to your regular anycookie sort of ingredients, I assembled some specialty items:
Maple syrup, available everywhere. Maple sugar, hard to find, I actually bought this package at the airport in British Columbia a very long time ago. The butter, a high-end brand called Kerrygold, is supposed to be extra delicious, no doubt due to a higher fat content. But once I’m using butter, I’m using butter, so special extra tasty high fat butter seems like a fine idea. I already knew these cookies weren’t falling into the healthy baking category, so all bets were off.
Oh, and I finally bought a stand for my iPad, so it doesn’t get covered in flour while I’m baking.
Before I dug into the sweet buttery goodness, I prepped the dry ingredients. I was running out of wheat germ — it’s amazing how quickly I go through that stuff — so I used mostly whole wheat white, and 1/3 of a cup of wheat germ. Baking powder, baking soda, and cinnamon followed.
In case you forgot this wasn’t a healthy recipe, I’ll get right to the next step: butter. And sugar. Two kinds of sugar, cane and maple. And butter. Did I mention butter?
Once “light and fluffy” was achieved, it was egg time.
In went the maple syrup.
It all came together beautifully, with a texture that was almost like frosting.
;
The flour was added in batches, to minimize its potential for poofing out of the mixer and into my face.
When I was done, it looked less like a spread and more like cookie dough.
I prepared the sugar for rolling. I didn’t have as much maple sugar left as the recipe called for, but I used what I had, mixing it in with cane sugar and cinnamon.
Here’s where Juliet came in.
I used a cookie scoop to ensure the sizes of the cookies wouldn’t vary too much, then rolled the dough into balls and gave each one a spin in a the cinnamon-almost-maple sugar. Juliet used the bottom of a glass — one of the bee glasses that were a gift from my wonderful, whimsical, traveling-companion-in-Paris aunt Penny — to flatten them. She took her job pretty seriously.
We found that ten minutes was the perfect baking time for these. I moved them to the wire rack as quickly as possible and we kept our assembly line going, cookie after cookie, tray after tray, squish after squish.
They look good, don’t they? They taste good too. Delicious, in fact. Crisp on the outside, soft on the inside, full of sweet cinnamon and a touch of maple. Unique, distinctive, but simple. An elegant cookie that you could serve at a dinner party or kids’ birthday party, and well worth breaking my “make only small cookies” rule for. They’re lovely.
MAPLE SNICKERDOODLES RECIPE (original)
My version of Maple Snickerdoodles (adapted from Craft Sew Create!)
(makes 4-5 dozen, depending on your cookie size)
ingredients:
3 2/3 cups whole wheat white flour
1/3 cup toasted wheat germ
3 heaping teaspoons ground cinnamon
3 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 1/2 cups cane sugar
1/2 cup maple sugar
6 tablespoons real maple syrup
2 large eggs
for rolling:
1/2 cup cane sugar
1/4 cup maple sugar
2 tablespoons ground cinnamon
directions:
Heat the oven to 350 degrees. (Frankly, I usually wait to do this until I’m shaping the cookies, because my oven heats up so quickly, but if yours doesn’t, heat it now!) Prepare a few baking sheets with parchment paper.
In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, wheat germ, baking powder, baking soda, and cinnamon.
In the bowl of a stand mixer, cream together the butter and sugars until light and fluffy. Add the eggs and the maple syrup, and beat well. Gradually add in the dry ingredients and beat until just combined.
Stir together the sugars and cinnamon for the topping in a small bowl.
Roll the dough into 1 inch balls and coat in the sugar topping. You can leave them round, or flatten them with the bottom of a glass dipped in the sugar mixture.
Bake for 8-10 minutes, cookies will be a bit crackly on top and look slightly underdone in the middle. Don’t worry, they’re ready! Move them to wire racks to cool as they come out of the oven.
These are large but thin, so they’re only 2 P+ on Weight Watchers. (And a worthy 2 points at that.)
What a great fall recipe!