Mexican Chocolate Snickerdoodles
Black cocoa powder makes this flavour-bomb of a snickerdoodle beautifully dark and dramatic. These cookies are a quick last-minute bake, and are a perfect treat for your fright night movie nights.
I do love a classic chocolate chip cookie, but snickerdoodles are up there in my favourite cookie list. They are soft and pillowy and comforting, coated in cinnamon and sugar, so what’s not to love?
Snickerdoodles are an excellent last minute bake. Of course, you will need to soften your butter, but if you cannot wait for your butter to soften, melting will yield beautiful results too, even if the cookie comes out a bit flatter than when one uses softened butter. Just make sure to cool your melted butter completely before adding in your eggs.
While most snickerdoodle recipes insist that you use room temperature eggs, in all the many, many times I have made this cookie, I have only ever used eggs out of my fridge. They still came out great! Out of curiosity, I did test this recipe a few times with room temp eggs, and honestly… I could not tell the difference between my cold-eggs cookie batch versus the batch I made with room temperature eggs.
There are a few things you must do when you bake these cookies. You must whip the butter and sugar for at least 3 to 5 minutes, until your butter and sugar looks pale and airy. Add the eggs in, one at a time, then beat until pale yellow and well incorporated. Fold in your dry ingredients in two parts, and mix until you no longer see any streaks of flour in your dough. Let your dough sit for at least half an hour so that your dough has enough time to absorb all those beautiful spices. And do not overbake! You want soft and pillowy cookies, not crispy biscuits.
The two most important ingredients you must have to achieve the texture and colour of this snickerdoodle are cream of tartar and black cocoa. Cream of tartar is a type of acid, most commonly known as the powder you use to stabilize egg whites in the making of a meringue. It also prevents the sugar from crystallizing long after heat has been applied to the recipe, which is why you get a softer, pillowy cookie in a snickerdoodle than, say, your typical chocolate chip cookie. And because cream of tartar is an acid, it gives the snickerdoodle a little bit of a tang.
Black cocoa is an ultra-Dutch-processed cocoa, which means it has been ultra-treated with an alkaline solution to decrease its acidity. When using Dutch-processed cocoa in your baked goods, it is important that you use leavening agents that will compensate for the lack of acidity in the cocoa. Snickerdoodles use baking soda, which is a base alkaline, meaning it will need to react with an acid for it to successfully leaven a baked good. This is why it is important to use cream of tartar in this cookie recipe; using an ultra-Dutch-processed cocoa will render the baking soda null. Black cocoa will also colour your cookies black, or at least, more black than cocoa brown. This really adds to the dramatic look of these snickerdoodles. That said, your regular grocery store might not necessarily stock black cocoa powder; they are typically found in speciality food stores or online. Any good-quality unsweetened cocoa powder will do—natural or Dutch-processed—but note that your cookies will not look as black as these ones.
Because it is almost Halloween, I have decorated these cookies with candy eyeballs. Obviously this is just an extra step I took because of the season. Simply melt a little bit of chocolate over a double boiler, and use this melted chocolate as a “glue” to affix these candied eyes onto your snickerdoodles. Adorable! Of course, you can dispense with the candy eyeballs and leave them as is; they look so beautiful and elegant, with their sugar coating sparkling like diamonds against the deep, dark black of the cookie.