We made snickerdoodles quite a bit growing up. It's the cookie I would call my brother John's signature. I have six brothers, and almost all of them are as good or better in the kitchen than most of us sisters. Or at least, me. I love to cook but I'm being serious, my brothers know how. Somehow every time I managed to be in charge of baking I had at least one of them over my shoulder. Now I'm not sure if it's because they doubted my expertise, if it was because I was the little sister, or because ... cookie dough. I know my dad came by because of the cookie dough.
My recipe said it made 48 servings, so I doubled it. For some reason the projected yield is never accurate for me, so of course I doubted I would get 96 cookies in the end. The double recipe ended up making 62 cookies, and I know we didn't eat 34 cookies-worth of dough. I was rather proud of myself actually. I limited myself greatly by only taking a sampling of the raw dough! I wanted to get an accurate figure on how much it would yield, wanted to make sure I had enough to serve the next day (making another batch meant that much more cost into ingredients), and I also wasn't really in the mood for sweets. I'm sure this goes down as a record as I didn't eat one. single. cookie. Not even freshly baked. Not even knowing we had milk in the refrigerator. I'm amazed. Someone needs to mark this date in history. As I was plating them though I let Aaron sample a cookie, so we ended up taking 61 to serve. Ideally I would've liked to have saved out about 10 cookies for hubby, but my numbers were cut a little too close.
I did try using oil in place of half the butter. If it worked so well in sheet pan bar cookies, then it should be fine in a regular cookie recipe, right? That's what I wanted to know. Using part oil does make a more greasy dough, but you really can't tell the difference when baked. After mixing up my dough it was a bit too soft to roll into balls, so I stuck it in the fridge to cool for an hour. This is one thing I never took into account when using a oil as a substitute. Butter hardens when cool, but oil remains in a liquid state. I really wasn't sure how well it would take to chilling, since I used half butter, half oil. It ended up just fine! The dough wasn't so hard you couldn't work with it, but was still soft and moldable. I formed about half the dough into balls and rolled it in the cinnamon/sugar mixture and put the rest of it back in the refrigerator so it wouldn't soften too much before I was ready to shape the rest of it.
Since the last cooking episode, I have been able to get a few ingredients at a lower cost than before. I paid 50c less per pound of butter, saved 12c/lb on sugar, and also stocked up on oil while it was on sale, which lowered my cost to $0.41/cup rather than the $0.64/cup I had paid previously. I had bought the other oil over the winter and couldn't remember what price I paid, so I had been calculating using the full price. Now that I know what I bought it for this time, I marked it on the bottle so I can look back for quick reference. I saved 64 cents just by finding cheaper prices on a few of my ingredients.
After baking, the cookies were about 3" in diameter, so they were a nice size. We took 61 cookies, and there were about a half dozen on the plate when I wrapped them up to head home, so the numbers ended up being just right. My final cost into the entire batch was $4.32, which gives us a figure of $0.07 per cookie. Comparing prices, it cost me almost a dollar less to make these versus the chocolate chip bars I made last month. And I saved 4 cents a serving compared to last time as well! I'm excited to have made it under my $5 goal budget. So far, $5 to feed dessert to 40 people seems like a fair number, but we've only tested two recipes, so stay tuned for our next dessert episode so we can compare again!
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