I've made a lot of variations of snickerdoodle recipes and I always seem to get the same results. I can make a thick chocolate chip cookie but snickerdoodles vex me. No matter what recipe I try, they always come out flat like this:
My oven is calibrated, my baking soda is fresh, and all of my ingredients are weighed. I preheat my oven and then wait 30 minutes until after my oven says it's up to temperature. I chill the dough 30 minutes before putting it on the sheets. This recipe I made today (results shown in the picture) is a merge of Cook's Illustrated's and Baked's (which were mostly similar anyway) but no recipe has ever given me the tall, fluffy cookie pictured in the cookbook:
Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
2 3/4 cups AP flour
2 tsp. cream of tartar
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, softened
1/4 cup vegetable shortening
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup light brown sugar
2 large eggs
The method is the standard creaming method.
Roll the 1.5 inch balls in a sugar/cinnamon mix.
Bake in oven for 9-11 minutes, rotating halfway through.
Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong?
FWIW, the flavor is great, and if I fold them in half, the texture's great too. 🙂 Per request, here's a picture from Baked's cookbook that has results I'd like:
Best Answer
While I haven't made this specific recipe before, I have made the Cook's Illustrated/America's Test Kitchen recipe many times. As you say, it is very similar - it uses slightly less flour and it uses white sugar exclusively.
One thing I will say - Snickerdoodles are, in general, pretty flat cookies. There are dozens of photos out there that show this to be the case. This site follows the CI recipe and you can see that they're pretty flat from the image at the top of the page:
This recipe does not turn out cookies that look like the ones in the photo you've posted. Never has in the 5+ years I've been making them. The tiny changes in flour and sugar are unlikely to have that much of an effect on the outcome.
Now, I do think that you may have a bit of trouble because they do seem a bit flat, even for snickerdoodles.
I find the biggest error that gets made with this cookie is overbaking. To stay soft in the center, these need to be just barely baked, the edges just beginning to darken and crisp. The only brown on the underside of the cookie should be from the cinnamon.
If they look undercooked in the middle, that's good. Generally, when I bake them, they get really shallow at the edges and have a poof in the center, which flattens out after baking.
If they have any snap after fully cooling, they're overbaked.
It is also possible that the overcrowding is part of the issue. When the cookies glom into one giant cookie, they can't cook all around evenly, so the signal to look for I've mentioned (and that is mentioned in the recipe) to tell that the cookie is done can be either delayed or never come at all... which means it's easier to leave them in too long.
Bake times are averages. You really need to use them as a guideline and focus instead on the signals the cookies give, like fragrance, browning, and shape.