By Halloween week. Used to be Clay's favorite holiday — he'd plan his costume in August, change his mind in September, panic in October, and go out as a ghost anyway because a bedsheet is free and Craig Hensley's children were raised to understand the budget. This year Clay is twenty-one and sober for three months and Halloween is just another Thursday group meeting, which is fine. Better than fine. I'll take a hundred ordinary Thursdays over one extraordinary night that ends with a phone call at 2 AM.
Work was four days of standing and pointing and pretending my back wasn't on fire. Danny's running the physical side now — not officially, nobody's said anything official, but the crew goes to Danny for the hands-on questions and comes to me for the planning, and I can see the shift happening like weather moving across a ridge. It's not bad. Danny's ready. I'm just not ready to be the man who's ready to let Danny be ready. That sentence doesn't make sense. Nothing about losing your body's cooperation makes sense when your brain still thinks it's 1991 and you can crawl through a four-foot mine tunnel for ten hours.
Amber stopped by Saturday on her way back from a nursing conference in Louisville. She brought pumpkin bread from some bakery and it was fine — sweet, moist, perfectly acceptable — and I ate a slice and smiled and waited until she left to tell Connie that pumpkin bread shouldn't have that much sugar and ought to taste like pumpkin, not cake. Connie said I was a snob. I said I was right. She said those aren't mutually exclusive. She's been using my own lines against me for thirty years.
So I made my own. Pumpkin bread, Sunday morning: canned pumpkin because I'm not roasting a pumpkin for quick bread, that's vanity not cooking — sugar, oil, eggs, flour, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, a little salt. The secret is less sugar than the recipe says and more spice than you think you need. Betty never made pumpkin bread because Betty didn't believe in quick bread — if it didn't involve biscuit dough or cornmeal batter, it wasn't bread, it was cake pretending. But I've expanded the canon. Just a little. Don't tell Betty. I cut a loaf for Amber to take home and she said it was better than the bakery's. I said I know. Connie said see, snob. She's not wrong.
The pumpkin bread settled something in me that Sunday — the reminder that a recipe is a starting point, not a verdict, and that less sugar and more spice is almost always the right correction. These cinnamon chip snickerdoodles follow the same philosophy: the cinnamon sugar coating is classic, but the cinnamon chips inside push it past polite and into something with actual conviction. Connie ate four before she called me a snob again. I’ll take it.
Soft and Chewy Cinnamon Chip Snickerdoodle Cookies
Prep Time: 20 min | Cook Time: 12 min | Total Time: 32 min | Servings: 36 cookies
Ingredients
- 2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
- 2 tsp cream of tartar
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 tsp ground cinnamon
- 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
- 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
- 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
- 2 large eggs
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 cup cinnamon chips
- For rolling: 3 tbsp granulated sugar + 1 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
Instructions
- Preheat. Heat oven to 375°F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
- Combine dry ingredients. In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, cream of tartar, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Set aside.
- Cream butter and sugar. In a large bowl, beat softened butter and granulated sugar together on medium-high speed until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes.
- Add eggs and vanilla. Beat in eggs one at a time, then mix in vanilla extract until fully combined.
- Mix in dry ingredients. Reduce mixer speed to low and add the flour mixture gradually, mixing just until no dry streaks remain. Do not overmix.
- Fold in cinnamon chips. Stir in cinnamon chips by hand with a spatula until evenly distributed.
- Prepare rolling mixture. In a small bowl, stir together the 3 tbsp sugar and 1 1/2 tsp cinnamon.
- Roll and coat. Scoop dough into 1 1/2-inch balls. Roll each ball in the cinnamon sugar mixture until fully coated. Place 2 inches apart on prepared baking sheets.
- Bake. Bake for 10–12 minutes, until edges are just set and centers look slightly underdone. They will firm up as they cool. Do not overbake.
- Cool. Let cookies rest on the baking sheet for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack. They should be soft and slightly crinkled at the edges.
Nutrition (per serving)
Calories: 145 | Protein: 2g | Fat: 7g | Carbs: 20g | Fiber: 0g | Sodium: 85mg