You probably had snickerdoodles as a kid. Maybe your grandmother or and an aunt made them for you. Snickerdoodles have always been a universal kids' favorite. Maybe it was the crackly cinnamon sugar coating. Maybe it was the chewy centers. Maybe it was the cinnamon and gold mottled surface. Whatever the reasons, these have been popular cookies for a very long time. (Our oldest cookbooks have snickerdoodle recipes in them.)

Every snickerdoodle recipe we have calls for shortening. Butter makes a better, healthier cookie. So we set about to make a snickerdoodle with butter. The result is these buttery snickerdoodles that our testers called “the best snickerdoodles ever.”

Butter is not the only secret to these snickerdoodles. A proper snickerdoodle has lots of cinnamon—but good cinnamon is hard to find. (Look for quality cinnamon in a specialty spice shop or online.) A good cinnamon will be spicy-sweet and smooth with less bite. Inexpensive cinnamon has an astringent, almost chemical, taste to it. The best cinnamons come from Indonesia or Sri Lanka. These snickerdoodles are made with a pure Korintje cassia cinnamon from Indonesia that is so smooth that you can dip the tip of your finger in it and eat it.

You'll have fun making these cookies with the kids. There is something about making little round balls with the dough and rolling those balls in the cinnamon and sugar mixture that kids delight in. These cookies are attractive enough to give as gifts.

Each mix is twice the size of the leading store brand. Each mix will make 40 one ounce (about 3-inch) cookies. (You will get more or fewer cookies depending on the size you choose to bake.)

"I just baked the snickerdoodles today and they turned out wonderful. I will buy them again without a doubt!" --Frankie

Ingredients: Enriched pastry flour (wheat flour, niacin, iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, and folic acid), sugar, eggs (whole dry eggs with less than 2% sodium silicoaluminate added as an anti-caking agent), xanthan gum, cinnamon, baking powder, baking soda, salt, natural vanilla flavor (vanilla, maltodextrin, modified food starch, and silicon dioxide), and cream of tartar. This mix contains wheat and egg. It may contain traces of nuts, soy, or dairy products.