Bake Sale Cookies

I’ve been open about my problem with cookbooks and food magazines regarding how I can’t stop collecting and reading them. Well, I also have an issue with collecting links to recipes I see on all those fabulous food blogs out there. The list of recipes keeps growing. Fortunately, a perfect opportunity for trying some of them presented itself. Bread Baby mentioned an upcoming bake sale and asked if anyone in Austin would like to donate items. She, in fact, had organized a very cool benefit for Space12 and planned a bake sale as part of it. What could be better than getting to try a few different recipes from my list and then having a place to take the baked goods to prevent me from eating them all? I wasted no time in combing through that long list of links and decided on these: cinnamon cappuccino cookies from A Kiss and a Cupcake, molasses cookies from Cooking During Stolen Moments, and banana snickerdoodles from Noble Pig.

I didn’t realize it when I picked those cookies, but they all have something in common. For all three cookies, balls of dough are formed and then are rolled in sugar or a sugar mixture before being placed on a baking sheet. I had the technique down after these recipes. The cinnamon cappuccino cookies have powdered espresso in the dough, and then the dough balls were rolled in cinnamon and sugar to which I added a little more espresso powder. The molasses cookies were rolled in sugar, and the banana snickerdoodles were rolled in cinnamon and sugar. I made one change to the banana snickerdoodle recipe which was to use butter instead of shortening, but I always do that.

These were three very different cookies in the flavor department, and I liked them all for different reasons. I’ll be keeping all three recipes in the permanent file. Kurt’s favorite, hands down, was the cinnamon cappuccino. I thought for sure my favorite was going to be the molasses cookie because I’ve become so taken with molasses in recent years, and it was extremely good. In the end though, I was torn between it and the banana snickerdoodle. The banana snickerdoodle dough was ridiculously good, and I almost had to restrain myself from eating the entire bowl before the cookies could be baked. Since I clearly can’t pick a winner among the three, I suggest you bake them all and let me know which one you like best.