the boys asked for pink cookies

Actually, the boys asked to go to the park, as they had every day for the rest of the week. But it was raining and I’d gotten home late and making cookies seemed like a good distraction. Then they had a long argument about whether we should make pink or brown cookies, and when I suggested we could do both, they quickly settled on pink. Ah, toddlers.

So: I could have done the pink-frosting thing, but that would have taken longer as well as being butter + suger on butter + sugar. The boys couldn’t help with frosting, either, but with snickerdoodles they could help with the cinnamon-sugar rolling. So I added a few drops of red food coloring to the butter/egg mixture and pink was achieved. You don’t have to do that, unless you want your uncooked dough to look like meatballs, as ours did.

I started with the (guess) Cooks Illustrated Light Recipes sugar cookie recipe. Aside from the red dye, the only change I made was the roll in cinnamon sugar–oh, and accidentally adding too much sugar to begin with, but you don’t have to do that either.

Snickerdoodles
Adapted from Cooks Illustrated

- 3/4 C unbleached flour
- 1/2 C cake flour
- 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 5 Tbsp butter, softened
- 1 C sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 Tbsp vanilla extract
- 1/3 C sugar
- 2 tsp ground cinnamon

1) Preheat oven to 375. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper.
2) Stir together flours with baking powder.
3) In a separate bowl, cream butter and 1 C sugar until very light and fluffy, 2 minutes with an electric mixer or 5 minutes by hand (or 10 minutes with toddlers). Add egg and beat well. Stir in vanilla.
4) Mix in flour until just combined.
5) Refrigerate for 20-30 minutes to firm up a bit. Skip this step if you have toddler “help.”
6) Mix cinnamon with 1/3 C sugar in a shallow bowl.
7) Scoop out dough in ~1-inch balls and roll in cinnamon sugar. Place 2 inches apart on baking sheets.
8 ) Bake one sheet at a time for 9 minutes.

Makes 30 cookies (only 90 calories each!) plus small dough snacks.

~Liss

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