Easy COOKIES(!!) and a Coffee Cake . . .

Happy holidays my fellow-snackable bakers. We are in the thick (or should I say thicc? - (IYKYK - see below) of cookie baking season, and I have a couple of easy-peasy ones to share. We’re talking Thicc and Chewy Dreamy Sugar Cookies and Epic Snickerdoodles for Stephanie (both from Snackable Bakes - a cookbook that would make a fantastic holiday gift for those with sweet-teeth in your life). And although I won’t be giving it a ton of air space in this letter, I should probably mention my peanut butter cookie, too (see a pic below) , because a (slightly fussier) version of it won an internet-wide PB cookie bake-off administered by the queen of bake-offs herself, my beloved, Erika Kwee.

Before I go deep into my sugar cookies and snickerdoodles, I want you to know what I mean when I say these cookies are “easy-peasy:” I mean cookies that take less than 10 minutes to assemble, are thrown together in a single bowl with a whisk and a spatula, call for only pantry-friendly ingredients and - probably the most important attribute of an EP cookie in my opinion - do not require a rest in the fridge (resting is a big deal in cookie baking land, which you probs already know, and I am against it).

Up first are my Thicc and Chewy Dreamy Sugar Cookies. They’re “thicc” because I am a thick and chewy sugar cookie peep from way back (as opposed to a thin and crispy one). And they are chewy due to two ingredients that might not be everybody’s favorites: corn syrup and shortening, but I believe such ingredients 100% make sense when easy is the name of the cookie game (corn syrup contributes to the cookies’ chewiness which you might be able to get from a rest in the fridge, as resting changes the texture of a cookie, but since we’re not resting, I turn to CS. And shortening helps the cookies keep their shape sans rest (i.e.: chilling stops cookies from spreading, but so does shortening . . .). These cookies in fact were the fan favorite at Vitsky Bakery this weekend when I popped-up there with my pal Brian Levy. 

And if you’d like to see me make these fab cookies, check out this video.

jessiesheehanbakes

A post shared by @jessiesheehanbakes

I made the video to help promote my fave butter, Plugra and Plugra is also a sponsor for my baking podcast, She’s My Cherry Pie.  The next cookies on my list to share are my snicks (a.k.a. snickerdoodles AND, before I tell you all about my GENIUS recipe (according to Food52), I thought I should mention that I recently interviewed my pal, Rebecca Firth on the pod and we went deep on - you guessed it - snickerdoodles. You can listen here.

So the genius reasons you need to make these snicks are not all that different than the genius reasons you need to make my sugar cookies or my pb cookies: simple ingredients, minimal dishes to wash, no resting pre-bake - you get the idea. Also, I named them after my recipe tester extraordinaire, Stephanie Whitten, because she ADORES snickerdoodles - and she told me as much upon testing these for the first time.

Finally, there’s a coffee cake recipe of mine that I think it is imperative that you know about as the holidays approach (and beyond). It’s my Best Sour Cream Coffee Cake Recipe With Cinnamon Swirl and it is also featured on the Food52 site.

This coffee cake is tender, plush and vanilla-infused with a cinnamon-sugar swirl and a crispy, buttery topping. It is as craveable for lunch, tea, after school or at night, as it is for breakfast. I mean who doesn’t want a cake that can hold its own around the clock? This cake is oil-based, making it wonderfully moist (even more so on day two), with a soft crumb and an easy-peasy assembly. The filling hits the right balance between sweet and spice and the cake is covered with a generous layer of decidedly un-sandy streusel. It bakes up wonderfully tall, and let’s hear it for 24-hour cake!

Alright friends: I think that about wraps it up for this week’s letter - obvs if you are not a paid subscriber, I’d love it if you considered becoming one, so I can share the cookbook writing process with you as I move into the second year of it (yes! I have a new easy-peasy SAVORY cookbook hitting shelves in October of 2024).

Finally, please always feel free to share what you like and don’t like about this letter - a.k.a. what you’d like to see more and less of . . . as I aim to please (in case you did not know).