SMS: Snickerdoodles!

This week's SMS was chosen by Spike of Spike Bakes: snickerdoodles! It's been a while since I've made snickerdoodles and I like them a lot, so I was happy to make them again. Plus, you can't really beat the portability of cookies so I knew these would be easy to share!

In my ongoing quest to avoid baking the recipes for my baking groups at the last minute, I planned to make these on Friday - two whole days in advance. It must be some kind of record for me! I read through the recipe and saw that, like most (all?) of the other cookie recipes we've tried from The Sweet Melissa Baking Book, this one calls for chilling the dough for an hour before baking. No problem - I threw the dough together (it's a simple recipe) and stuck it in the fridge before Shane and I headed out to see Julie and Julia!!

(As an aside, if you haven't seen Julie and Julia, I highly recommend it. I truly enjoyed it, particularly the storyline involving Meryl Streep as Julia Child. I thought Meryl did an amazing job portraying Julia, so good that I found it easy to forget I wasn't actually watching Julia. The movie inspired me to learn more about Julia. I'd borrowed her book, My Life in France, from my library recently and now I can't wait to curl up and dig in! The storyline about Julie was fun too. I found her very relatable, though just not as charming as Julia. This is one movie I'm looking forward to seeing again when it comes to DVD!)

When we got back from the movie, I removed the cookie dough from the fridge and let it sit on the counter for a while until it softened enough that I could work with it. Forming the dough into balls and rolling them in the cinnamon sugar mixture was fun and it made me happy to know that my cookies would have a cinnamon sugar coating when they emerged from the oven because in my world everything is better with more sugar :) By the time I finished getting the cookies onto the baking sheets, the dough was pretty soft but I was too impatient to chill them again before baking. I wasn't sure if they'd retain their shape or would spread a ton in the oven.

Luckily, after 12 minutes in the oven, they were perfect - wonderfully chewy and delicious! I shared some with our neighbors, who also enjoyed them! Thanks to Spike for a terrific pick this week! You can find the recipe on her blog and you can see all of this week's cookies by visiting the SMS site.