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Health & Fitness

Welcome to Will Thayer's Baking Blog!

Check out this great recipe!

Hi, everybody! As you may know from I’m William Thayer. I am an aspiring baker and writer who wishes to share my love for both of these things through this blog. But first, you should get to know me.

I was born and raised in Regent Square where I live with my brother, Ben, and my parents. I live on a dead end block, full of 10 children ranging in age from one to 14. I would always bake for them and I think they know pretty much all of my recipes. My next-door neighbor and I shared the love to bake, so in our free time, we would “experiment” in the kitchen. We started off making brownies from the box for years.

But when I turned seven, my parents decided that my brother and I would take one full week out of our summer and visit our grandparents in Byesville, Ohio. 
When it was my turn to visit them, I was not excited at all. On the third day, my aunt came to visit, and all we did was bake, from peanut brittle to red velvet cakes, we made it all. When that week ended, all I wanted to do when I got home was bake, and that is exactly what I did.

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About a year or two after I visited my grandparent’s house I realized something—what fun is it to bake, if you can’t add your own twist to a recipe? So, I tried and tried to do that, but it never worked out. Later that year around Thanksgiving, I
visited my other grandma in Somerset, Kentucky. There, she taught me how to
match flavors and what needs to be in a recipe and what doesn’t, and that’s my
story of how I started baking.

The recipe below is one of the first things I ever made by myself. It’s a classic snicker-doodle with a tasty twist.  

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Ingredients:

  • 1 cup butter
  • 1 ¼ cups sugar            
  • 2 large eggs
  • 2 3/4 cups flour
  • 2 teaspoons cream of tartar
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • ¼ teaspoon salt
  • 3 tablespoons sugar
  • 3 teaspoons cinnamon
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • ¼ cup maple sugar

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350°F.

2. Mix butter, 1 1/4 cups sugar, maple sugar and eggs thoroughly in a large bowl.

3. Combine flour, cream of tartar, baking soda and salt in a separate bowl.

4. Blend dry ingredients into butter mixture.

5. Chill dough, and chill an ungreased cookie sheet for about 10-15 minutes in the fridge.

6. Meanwhile, mix 3 tablespoons sugar, and 3 teaspoons cinnamon in a small bowl.

7. Scoop 1 inch globs of dough into the sugar/ cinnamon mixture.

8. Coat by gently rolling balls of dough in the sugar mixture.

9. Place on chilled ungreased cookie sheet, and bake 10 minutes.

10. Remove from pan immediately.

11. Enjoy!

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