Pumpkin Snickerdoodles

I wasn’t lying when I said we have a theme. So these cookies are actually for a fundraiser so if they don’t turn out (currently still in the oven), I will be disappointing the children. Honestly if they fail I’ll commit a sin and buy them from the store or just make chocolate chip cookies, hmm…And in case you want the recipe: RECIPE!

Anyways, the story to be told is more about this oooother time I tried to make plain old snickerdoodles after learning how in Home Ec. Yes, we are taking a little trip back in time to possibly understand why I was averse to cooking and stuck to simple jello for many years. My friend and I decided to make snickerdoodles and so we divided the list of ingredients in half and set to work. Right off the bat, we kind of messed it up by not letting the butter soften enough but trying to cream it anyways. This then resulted in us putting it into the microwave to soften (quite sensible) but this was after we had mixed it with things like eggs. It turns out microwaves cook eggs! Things we wouldn’t learn until our microwave unit, yes we had an entire marking period of Home Ec devoted to cooking with a microwave, or until college when we were just plain lazy. So there are small amounts of what appear to be cooked egg in our batter. No matter, the show must go on! As we continue to mix things this just really doesn’t look right but we put the little dough balls into the oven anyways.

One of my favorite parts of baking is checking half way through to see cookies or cakes rising into baked deliciousness. This did not happen for our poor snickerdoodles. They remained solid little dough balls until we decided they must be done even though they had not morphed into soft baked sugary goodness. At this point, you would think we would throw them away and start over. Although we did eventually try again, we decided, in our adventuresome and naïve youth, to try these failures. They were disgusting. They didn’t even taste like anything remotely good so we promptly spit them out and were left, snickerdoodle-less, wondering what went wrong.

After careful consideration we realized our error. When dividing the ingredients, I had devided them into wet and dry, that’s what it looked like on the page. Apparently there was a third set of ingredients that consisted of one tiny little detail: sugar. Neither of us had added sugar to our sets of ingredients. We redid the process with all the ingredients and voila! Snickerdoodles.

Evidently sugar is important to the chemistry of baking. And that whole Everybody thought Somebody would do it but Nobody did it even though Anybody could have done it is very true. Communicate people! Or bake alone, that works too.

Oodles of doodles!