Snickerdoodles

My 9-year-old son has been begging for snickerdoodles for the past few months. Every time I get out the KitchenAid mixer, he asks if I’m going to make them. So tonight, while the kids were playing Legos together in the basement, I decided to make snickerdoodles.

Looking at my snickerdoodle recipe always brings back memories. I don’t remember exactly when I wrote it down, but I think it was sometime during college, sometime around 2003 or 2004. I know it was when I still lived in Colorado because the recipe is scrawled on a paper with wood and building companies, something brought home by my dad from his job at the local lumber store or from from the earlier days when he built homes in our mountain town.

It was when my grandparents were still living in Peru. They had retired early to become volunteer missionaries and ended up spending over ten years in Lima. Mema had asked me to make a batch of my uncle’s favorite cookies and mail them to him in Southern California for his birthday. I had never made snickerdoodles before, but found a recipe online and put the final product in the mail. Mema emailed me a week later to say that my uncle said my snickerdoodles were better than hers. So I wrote the recipe down and have been making them ever since.

I pulled the snickerdoodles out of the oven, breathing in the aroma of cinnamon and sweet memories.