Inside-Out Snickerdoodles

Put the cinnamon inside and avoid the rolling!

I kinda like Snickerdoodles, because I like cinnamon, but I’m not really crazy about the burst of sugar and cinnamon on the tongue as soon as you take a bite. So I just added the cinnamon to the basic dough and left out the additional sugar used to coat the cookies. The end result is a crackled cinnamon cookie with a kind of a sandy, chewy texture.

You could do this with any Snickerdoodle recipe, such as this one I made a few years ago, which by the way has pretty much the same ingredients, but more flour. The older one is from my Betty Crocker cookbook, and this newer one is from America’s Test Kitchen (paywall). ATK makes it sound like they thought up the cream of tartar, but it was also in my old Betty Crocker recipe, so maybe they just meant that they agreed with all the other recipes that use it. Both recipes also suggest using a combination of butter and solid shortening. In the past I just used all butter, but today, I went with the suggestion of both.

Here’s the ATK video of Snickerdoodles, followed by photos of my own cookies with the cinnamon inside:

Here are my cookies. I used a 1/4 cup scoop for my cookies, about twice the size of the ATK cookies, so they were larger than normal, some of them spreading out into the next cookie, even with only 6 per sheet. If you make large ones, they will need to bake for up to 6 minutes longer than the recipe suggests:

Inside-Out Snickerdoodles

Servings: 1.5 dozen
Time: 18 mins
Difficulty: easy
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Preheat oven to 375º and line cookie sheets with parchment paper. I got 1 1/2 dozen large cookies from this recipe, but you could get 3 dozen smaller cookies.

Ingredients

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons cream of tartar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon cinnamon
1/2 cup (one stick) softened butter
1/2 cup vegetable shortening
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 large eggs

Instructions

Whisk dry ingredients, including cinnamon, in bowl and set aside.
In stand mixer or large bowl with portable mixer, beat together butter, shortening, and sugar until smooth and fluffy.
Beat in eggs, one at a time.
Carefully mix in dry ingredients until there are no dry pockets of dough.
Scoop out dough with cookie scoop of desired size and place on parchment lined cookie sheets.
Bake smaller cookies at 375º for 8-12 minutes; larger cookies for up to 18 minutes. No need to over-brown the cookies. They will set upon cooling. I let mine cool on the cookie sheet for a few minutes before trying to lift them onto the cooling rack.