Candy Cane Snickerdoodles

About two days after I made my pumpkin snickerdoodles, I came across this recipe for Skinny Snickerdoodles by Chocolate Covered Katie. Considering all of the holiday baking I'm planning over the next couple of weeks, I'm doing anything I can to make great tasting, lower calorie desserts to maximize the number of cookies I can eat! So I made a mental note that if I decided to make snickerdoodles, I should make them skinny.

Then I saw these Peppermint Snickerdoodles, and I knew I had the perfect combination of recipe and inspiration.

I followed the skinny snickerdoodle recipe exactly and place my small sugar and cinnamon rolled balls of dough in the refrigerator, so they'd get really cold and treat me to soft cookies. I pushed the balls of dough down and added some crumbled candy canes to the top. I bought mini candy canes at Target, open about seven of them, and put them in a sandwich bag. I then proceeded to use everything I could think of to crush them. I had no idea it would be so difficult. It seems like when you buy a box of candy canes, half are usually already broken, so I assumed they'd crack apart easily. It actually took me quite awhile to get enough small pieces that I could sprinkle them on the cookies without the eater being forced to bite down on a huge hunk of candy cane.

Not to worry though. I eventually got enough candy canes broken up, and while in the oven, the candy canes began to melt and soften ever so slightly, looking oh-so-delicious through the oven door. These snickerdoodles come out of the oven looking underdone, but once they cool they are really the perfect thin and soft cookie. The crunchiness of the candy cane really goes well with the softness of the cookie, and the peppermint flavor is refreshing and wintery. This recipe is also perfectly sized for two people to split over a few days. I got a dozen decently sized cookies out of it. Maybe you'd get another or two if you didn't save a little of the dough at the end to consume before baking, but hey, it didn't seem like it was worth it to get out another whole cookie sheet for such a small batch. I was actually doing myself a favor, you see.

It took so much self control to not eat these straight out of the oven because they made the whole apartment smell like a cross between peppermint and sugar cookies, two of the BEST Christmas smells ever. But I managed to let them cool, and we even managed to wait until after Dustin got home and we ate dinner to indulge in these treats. I'm quite impressed with our self control. Maybe (I'll explain later).

When I told Dustin these were actually low-calorie vegan cookies after he'd already eaten two, he gave me a funny look. For some reason I think he equates vegan cooking with strange ingredients consisting of only seeds and vegetables, which totally isn't true. I think it's pretty cool that vegan diets are becoming so popular after gaining a reputation of weirdness. Now I know I could never convince Dustin to stick with a vegan diet (we both love cheeseburgers waaaay too much), but after some of tasty and healthy desserts I think he can be convinced that vegan desserts are brilliant because you can eat the dough without having to worry about consuming raw egg and they often allow you to eat more desserts for the same caloric bite.

Then Dustin proceeded to eat a third cookie, asking me if that was bad (see why I said maybe I was impressed by our self control?). Vegan or not, as long as they taste great, we'll eat 'em. Excuse me while I go raid the cookie jar!