Brown Sugar Snickerdoodle Cookies

Recipe:

Ingredient Notes:

• Butter. Use butter with a fat content of 72% or higher. I do not recommend vegetable shortening as it adds a subtle chemical flavor that ruins everything. The butter in this recipe is soft – room temperature. But not melted!
• Brown sugar. For the dough, use brown sugar – it is better to get a darker variety, it will be more flavorful. But do not use muscovado sugar – it will be too much. Regular white sugar is fine for rolling, but you can use brown sugar if you like. I do not recommend reducing the amount of sugar in the dough, as I wrote in the note to the recipe. It greatly affects the texture of the finished cookies. And the consistency of the raw dough as well.
• Cinnamon. You should not remove it from the recipe – it is the main flavor accent here. Without cinnamon, you’ll just get the usual sweet cookies.
• Eggs. You will need one medium-sized egg. It weighs about 55 grams. Like the butter, the egg should be at room temperature.
• Vanilla. You can use either vanilla sugar or vanilla extract. The substitution ratio is 1 to 1.
• Flour. All-purpose flour with a protein content of about 10% works well in this recipe. Strong bread flour is not the best choice for these cookies.
• Cornstarch. This recipe uses starch to give the cookies a softer, crumblier texture. The ingredient list calls for cornstarch, but you can use potato starch, which you can substitute 1 to 1. If you don’t have starch at all, substitute a similar amount of flour. The cookies will still be good.

Let’s start cooking.

Cream the butter with the sugar, salt and vanilla sugar. The sugar will not dissolve completely – this is normal.

Add the egg and beat again.

Add flour sifted with cornstarch, baking soda and baking powder and knead into a soft dough.

Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 20-30 minutes.

In a bowl, mix sugar and cinnamon for rolling.

Shape the cooled dough into 12 balls and roll in the cinnamon-sugar mixture.

Place on a baking sheet about 3-4 cm apart – the balls will spread when baked.

Bake in a preheated oven at 180°C (355°F) for about 7 minutes. Then turn the oven to 180 degrees and bake for another 6-7 minutes, until the edges are lightly browned. Do not overbake or the cookies will harden.

Immediately transfer the cookies to a rack to cool.

Store in a tightly closed container. The cookies will keep for up to 2 weeks, but will taste best within the first 3 days.

Enjoy!