Sugar Cookie Rebel

I am a rebel.

I used to be such a good, shy, demure little cook; baking things exactly as the recipe stated. Ruthlessly measuring and leveling off the cups and spoons. Because, as many bakers will tell you, if you mess with that magical chemistry that happens between the the flour, the sugar, the salt, etc - LIFE AS WE MAY KNOW IT MAY CEASE AND IT WILL ALL BE YOUR FAULT. Or worse, your cake won't rise.

But in one afternoon, I became a new person.

It happened fairly quickly. I realized I was one egg short of the recipe (you know, as in "She's one sandwich short of a picnic?). So I put in a little less flour.
Then I saw that the recipe wanted me to use almond flavoring, but I trumped that with my vanilla.
Next to go was the cream of tartar, mostly because I didn't feel like digging it out. I mean, after the egg and the almond flavoring, the world was pretty much doomed, right? So why waste 45 precious seconds trying to find that little bottle?
And then...then I got even crazier. I saw the cinnamon in my cabinet when I went to grab the bag of sugar. One minute I was reaching for the white powdery goodness, the next I was laughing manically with a spice bottle in my hand. Luckily for The Professor's students, I remembered to go back for the sugar.

If the world ends tomorrow, I'll apologize for not going back for the cream of tartar.


Cinnamon sugar cookies

• 1 cup butter
• 2 1/4 cups powdered sugar
• 3 eggs
• 4 cups flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 Tbsp cinnamon
• Cinnamon sugar (optional)

Preheat oven to 375F.

Cream butter and sugar together. Add eggs and vanilla, and combine completely. I've taken enough chances here, let's not add "under-beaten eggs" to the list.
Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cinnamon. Gradually add to the butter mixture.

This was originally a rolled cookie recipe - so if you'd like to clean your cookie cutters later, go ahead and refrigerate it for about a couple of hours, then shape it into logs and cut it into cookies.

If - like me - you are way to lazy to do all that, drop them with spoons onto a greased cookie sheet. And pray that they don't spread too much.

Now, if you are one 1/16th of the cinnamon freak that I am, you will grab your cinnamon sugar and shake a little over each cookie. Then you'll realize you're drooling over the thought of cinnamon sugar and feel a little ashamed.

Bake for about 10 minutes, but these burn pretty quickly - so keep an eye on them. OR THE WORLD COULD END.

Notes:
I doubled the original recipe, so this makes a lot of cookies - about 4 dozen. But I'm sure that The Professor needed the challenge of 19 year olds on a sugar high, so I refuse to feel guilty.

I started off with the oven at 350F, but turned it up a bit because the cookies were spreading a wee bit too much. I have no idea if this is why they stopped spreading, but I'm going to claim it as a another moment of genius.

The recipe I was looking at is in the "Betty Crocker New Cookbook". I'm not sure what my brain actually saw - but that's where I started from.