Recipe: Clementine Orange Snickerdoodles | Cooking On the Side (2024)

FAQs

Why are my snickerdoodles so soft? ›

Slightly under-baking the snickerdoodles also guarantees a softer cookie.

Granulated Sugar and Ground Cinnamon: These two are mixed together to create the classic cinnamon-sugar coating that snickerdoodles are known for. The sugar caramelizes slightly as the cookies bake, giving them a slightly crisp exterior.

Too much flour: If you add too much flour to your cookie dough, it will be dry and crumbly. Make sure to measure your flour correctly using a kitchen scale or by spooning it into your measuring cup and then leveling it off.

If your cookies repeatedly turn out flat, no matter the recipe, chances are your oven is too hot. Here's what's happening. The butter melts super quickly in a too-hot oven before the other ingredients have firmed up into a cookie structure. Therefore, as the butter spreads so does the whole liquidy cookie.

Texture: Touch the surface of the cookies gently. They are likely not fully cooked if they feel excessively soft or doughy. Properly baked cookies should have a slightly firm texture on the outside. Spread: Raw or undercooked cookies may spread excessively during baking and have a flatter shape than desired.

To make cookies crispy, add less liquid or bake it in the oven for longer to dry out the dough. Generally bake around 13-15min at 180C for a crispy cookie. But if you want a thoroughly crispy cookie – not those just charred on the outside – decrease the temperature to 140C and bake for 30min.

Snickerdoodles are similar to sugar cookies, in that the body of the cookie itself is flavored simply by sugar, butter, and vanilla, but the difference is that they're rolled in a cinnamon-sugar mix on the outside. Sometimes, a bit of cinnamon is added to the dough as well, depending on the recipe.

Baking cookies quickly in a hot oven – at 375 degrees F as opposed to a lower temperature – will make for soft results. They'll bake fast instead of sitting and drying out in the oven's hot air. Ever so slightly underbaking your cookies will give you softer results than cooking them the full amount the recipe says.

I used a #30 scoop for my chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, apricot molasses, sugar, peanut butter, and snickerdoodle cookies, and they all baked pretty uniformly and produced 2.5″ cookies. I used a #40 scoop for my red velvet cookies, because they puff up and expand quite a bit.

1) Chilling cookie dough controls spread.

Chilling cookie dough before baking solidifies the fat in the cookies. As the cookies bake, the fat in the chilled cookie dough takes longer to melt than room-temperature fat. And the longer the fat remains solid, the less cookies spread.

How do you thicken snickerdoodle dough? ›

Soft – Dough that's “soft” or “runny” can be thickened by adding one or two tablespoons of flour to your mix.

Put your timer on for nine minutes. You do NOT want to over bake. Take the cookies out when the bottoms are browned, but there are no brown edges on top (then you've over baked). The cookies set up as they cool and are at their best once fully cooled.

Insert a toothpick into the centre of a cookie. If it comes out with a few moist crumbs clinging to it, the cookies are done. If the toothpick comes out wet or with raw batter, the cookies need more baking time.

Another way to tell is color and surface texture. For white or yellow cakes, the surface should be uniformly golden brown all the way across, not just around the edges. Raw batter is shiny because of the butter or oil content; cooked batter is matte.