Whole Wheat Cardamom Snickerdoodles

These Whole Wheat Cardamom Snickerdoodles are spicy, buttery and addictive...and they're whole grain so they're healthy (a little bit, sort of)! They're particularly fabulous served alongside some Earl Grey tea, which is how I ate about a zillion of them last night! 

Prepare the dough ahead-of-time and freeze the pre-baked cookies so you can bake a few up whenever you need a delicious treat or quick dessert. 

Whole Wheat Cardamom Snickerdoodles 

Adapted from The America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book 
(Makes 50 small cookies)

Dry
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 cup whole wheat flour

2 teaspoons cream of tartar

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon sea salt

Wet

1 1/4 cups sugar

1 teaspoon spice/sugar mixture (below)

1 stick (8T) salted butter

1/2 cup vegetable shortening

2 large organic eggs

Cardamom Cinnamon Sugar

3 Tablespoons sugar

1 T cinnamon

1 teaspoon cardamom

Preheat your oven to 350°F.

Combine the cardamom, cinnamon and sugar in a bowl or baggie and set aside. 

Whisk the dry ingredients together and set aside. 

With an electric mixer on medium speed, cream the butter, shortening and sugar for about 3 minutes. Beat in the eggs until the batter is fluffy and lightened in color. Add the dry ingredients to the wet and mix until combined. 

Roll 1 tablespoon of dough between your palms to form a ball and then roll that ball in the spiced sugar mixture. Place each cookie about 2 inches apart on a baking sheet lined with parchment or a silt-pat. Bake one sheet at a time in the center of the oven for 7-8 minutes until the cookies have puffed and just started to brown and crack. When you look into the cracks, the batter will look undercooked. This will result in a chewier more tender cookie! 

Allow the cookies to cool on the baking sheet until slightly firmed, then move them to a wire rack to finish cooling. These cookies work really well when they're made larger too, so use 2 Tablespoons of dough per cookie to make 25  big ones if you prefer. Bake for about 10 minutes.  

Note: Prepare all the cookies at once and freeze them for future use! I like to roll all the dough into balls and then roll each ball in the spiced sugar. 

I set each finished raw cookie on a baking sheet, and when they're all done, I pop the whole baking sheet into the freezer and allow them to harden for about two hours. 

Then I transfer the frozen dough balls to baggies and store them in the freezer. This way, any time I NEED a snickerdoodle, I can just pull out however many I want, place them on a prepared baking sheet, preheat my oven (this allows time for the cookies to warm-up a bit before baking) and then bake them as directed above.