by Shilpa Saravanan, editor-in-chief & Annie Zhang, executive editor

Snickerdoodles are comforting, well-loved and eminently forgiving. In short, they’re the perfect recipe for us, because we want to be well-loved, and we need forgiveness (after all the cookie dough we ate). Also, we thought we’d start off with something classic — you know, before we try to make soda bread and Irish butter in preparation for St. Patrick’s Day. We’re drawing you in: join the Dark Side, we have cookies!

Here’s the recipe we used: we encourage you to go read that. Obviously, we picked it because it calls itself “The Best.” We have high culinary taste here at the Roar. It’s not like we spend at least five minutes every afternoon foraging in the closet, hoping to find some stale cookies or a bag of popcorn. Of course not.

These five easily-found kitchen items (pictured above — if you think we’re putting kimchi in our cookies, you probably didn’t read the recipe link) are the only ones you need to make a batch of snickerdoodles that’s sure to be well loved — that is, aside from an egg and some brown sugar, but we’d neglected to take the egg out of the refrigerator when we took this photo, and the brown sugar…well, we had to take a knife to it. Several times.

The pretty near-third-of-a-cup you see here was the result of ten minutes’ hard scraping. Many Bothans died to bring us this information.

Avoid inputting 30 seconds as the softening time for your butter. Speaking from experience, you will be less-than-pleased with the results. We found 11 to be more than enough time for that butter to get all mushy-squooshy but not quite all ooey-gooey. Cream the resulting greasy yellow solid, which should only loosely retain its stick-like form, with the sugar — check out that motion! VROOM, VROOM. Not quite a Maserati, but almost as pretty.

Of course, the blades proved difficult to clean, so we resorted to a spatula and two repetitions of Katy Perry’s “Hot N Cold” for all subsequent steps involving heavy mixing, like the one in which we had added the egg and vanilla extract. And the one in which we added the flour, cream of tartar and baking soda. Our arm muscles grew. We are strong. We are SWOLE. We are — Hugh Jackman as Wolverine?

Well, very nearly so. Post-mixing, we threw the dough in the refrigerator to chill for a while. A while here being “at least one hour,” during which we, too, attempted to chill. However, we’re only human, so we took the dough out after 15 minutes. It felt cold enough, so we commenced rolling globs of it in the magical cinnamon sugar.

THEY SEE ME ROLLIN’. THEY HATIN’. Eventually, we had our own little army (rank-and-file and all) of cinnamon-sugar-covered two-heaping-tablespoon drops. You may find that two tablespoons is a bit much; we certainly did, but only after we baked this batch. Half a tablespoon will suffice for three dozen cute, delicate snickerdoodles. But if you like your cookies big, by all means, carry on.

We didn’t think they were too big until we peeked into the oven after the requisite eight minutes and our little snickerdoodles were Very Not Baked. So, we put another seven minutes on the clock, and when the delicious smell of something indescribably cinnamon-y began to waft through the kitchen, we knew we’d done well. Relatively speaking. They may have looked like bread at first, but after cooling for a little while, we couldn’t get enough.

That’s only kind of a lie. We ate half a cookie each. The rest we hid from ourselves under layers of aluminum foil and Saran wrap. They’ll make an appearance at the Roar’s late night on Thursday — apologies for breaking the fourth wall!

Join us in two weeks, when we’ll make enough sweets to feed a Valentine’s Day party… of ONE!