Updated Snickerdoodles recipe maintains childhood connection

BY BONNIE AMBROSI

Iwas very fortunate, I now realize, to have a mom who was always there when I got home from school. To say that Mamma didn’t work would be wildly inaccurate. She worked tirelessly as a farm wife and the pastor of a small country church. She milked cows and chased them back into the pasture when they got out (usually on a Sunday morning, it seemed), tended a huge garden, canned fruits and vegetables, helped my dad in the fields, mowed local cemeteries, gave piano lessons, wrote sermons, and looked after her little local congregation and our rural community. She made meals three times a day on a shoestring.

And she was there for us at 4 p.m., often with freshly-baked cookies — usually Snickerdoodles.

Bonnie’s Snickerdoodles

Makes 2 dozen cookies

¼ cup Earth Balance Buttery Spread, softened

⅔ cup sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar

1½ cups whole wheat pastry flour or spelt flour

1 teaspoon cream of tartar

1 teaspoon baking soda

¼ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon cinnamon

3 tablespoons unsweetened almond milk or other plant milk

3 tablespoons sugar

½ teaspoon cinnamon

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Use a wooden spoon to cream together the softened Earth Balance Spread and ⅔ cup sugar. Add vanilla and vinegar. Add flour, cream of tartar, baking soda, salt and ¼ teaspoon cinnamon. Add unsweetened almond milk or other plant milk, one tablespoon at a time.

Mamma used the recipe found in her 1956 Betty Crocker’s Picture Cookbook. I have that cookbook. It is held together with duct tape, and the most-used pages are barely legible for all the spatters and food stains. These are the marks of a successful cookbook.

The recipe I present to you today is not quite as printed in the 1956 Betty Crocker. I admit that I have a thing about using whole grain flour — I simply cannot bring myself to bake with white flour. I use whole grain spelt flour or whole wheat pastry flour, and my kids have never complained. Do not, however, use whole wheat bread flour, or the result will be too coarse.

Mamma made Snickerdoodles with Crisco, because it was the ’60s and that was what we used. I have substituted Earth Balance Buttery Spread, the yummiest plant-based butter on the planet.

After many test batches, my teenage daughter, Emma, and I have come up with this version which satisfies my whole-grain sensibilities and is also very much like the cookies my mom made for me 50 years ago: slightly crunchy outside, soft and pillowy inside, with a mild cinnamon flavor. I hope you like them.

You’ll find that the Snickerdoodle dough has a nice, moldable consistency — neither sticky nor crumbly. Kids can easily help you with making the dough into balls, then rolling each ball in the cinnamon-sugar mixture. This is how happy kitchen memories are made.

Bonnie Ambrosi lives in Duluth and is an organizer of The Vegan Cookbook Club which meets at 11:30 a.m. on the first Thursday of every month at Mount Royal Branch Library. She writes once a month for the Taste section in the Duluth News Tribune.

Finish mixing it with your hands; the dough should come together nicely, neither sticky nor too crumbly. Combine the final 3 tablespoons of sugar and ½ teaspoon cinnamon in a wide, shallow bowl. Make 1-inch balls of dough and roll each ball in the mixture. Place balls 1 inch apart on ungreased or parchment-papercovered cookie sheet. Bake at 375 degrees for 9 minutes. Do not overbake! Take sheet out of oven, but let cookies cool for a couple of minutes before removing them from the sheet to a cooling rack or brown paper.