Recipe: Snickerdoodles

Autumn is a great time for baking and there's seriously nothing better than the combination of sugar, butter, vanilla and the queen of cold weather spices, cinnamon. Everything about this recipe just gives off happy, cosy vibes too- from the smell as the cookies bake, the soft, lightly spiced end result and the name snickerdoodle! This recipe was tweaked and adjusted from a recipe on the BBC Good Food website. It's super simple and one that kids will enjoy helping with, as the dough needs to be rolled into cinnamon sugar (lots of potential for fun messiness!)

Ingredients

200g softened unsalted butter

150g caster sugar

50g light brown sugar

300g plain flour

2tsp vanilla bean paste or vanilla essence (I've seen both used in recipes, use whichever you prefer)

1 1/2 tsp of cream of tartar

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

pinch of salt

3 tbsp milk (although have the bottle on hand, just in case!)

For the topping*

3 tbsp caster sugar

1 tbsp cinnamon

*this gave more than enough for the cookies and left with a decent amount leftover which filled a quarter of a jar. You could probably halve this amount if you didn't want any leftover cinnamon sugar. I've saved it to make cinnamon toast though, so win/win!

Method:

1) Preheat the oven to 200/180 fan/ gas mark 6 and line a couple of baking trays with baking paper/parchment. Mix the butter and sugars together. When the mixture looks light and fluffy, add in the vanilla paste/essence and mix well.

2) Add the flour, salt, bicarb and cream of tartar and mix well. Add the milk and mix until you have a dough. If it feels too dry, add a little more milk, but be careful as you don't want the mixture to become too wet. 

3) Mix the cinnamon and caster sugar together. Then, take the mixture and roll it into balls. Roll these into the cinnamon sugar mixture and then place them about 5cm apart. Flatten each ball lightly and then bake for 10-12 minutes, or until light and golden.

4) Allow to cool for five minutes and then pop onto a wire rack to fully cool. Then serve with your favourite autumnal drink (in the photo it's a mug of Candied Apple tea!)