White Chocolate Snickerdoodle Cookies

I'm so excited to finally share the recipe and photos for these white chocolate snickerdoodle cookies from the Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap!

This was my first year participating and I had an absolute blast. I love baking cookies (especially around the holidays) and I also love baking for a cause. This year's participants each donated a minimum of $4 to Cookies for Kids' Cancer and were then secretly matched up with 3 other bloggers to which they would send cookies. Each blogger received 3 different dozens of cookies from 3 different bloggers.

My matches that I sent White Chocolate Snickerdoodle Cookies to were Jennifer from Girl on The Range, Beth from Beth's Blue Plate, and Matt from Kitchen Man Cooks. (I loved checking out your blogs, guys!)

I received cookies from Stick a Fork in It (deliciously classic brownie cookies, dubbed "brookies"), Destination Delish (fantastically festive cranberry rosemary dark chocolate dipped shortbread), and From Me to Vuu (seriously adorable mint panda cookies). Be sure to check out their blogs! Each of them are lovely. Before I tore into the packages, I snapped some photos on my Instagram!

I love a good old-fashioned cookie swap, but I really enjoyed the presentation aspect of packaging these cookies up for shipment. I may have weaseled my way into having my artistic sister, Stef, decorate my shipping boxes for me.

Alright, yes. I did. She did a lovely job on them, and even let me do my own mitten and string of Christmas lights!

I picked up plain white shipping boxes from Target, and they were under $2 a piece. The polka dot cards were a lovely find in the "dollar" section of Target...I always fall prey to that place. A bag of mini Kit Kats in Christmas colors happened to jump into my cart at Target too, so I split those up three ways to my prospective bloggers.

I hope you guys liked it! I figured I couldn't send cookies without also sending some chocolate. I found the Santa treat boxes, festive cookie cutters, and Christmas themed treat bags all in Michaels.

They have a fantastic holiday section if you get there before "prime" Christmas season.

Now, back to the cookies.

Snickerdoodle cookies were never a staple in our house growing up, but I think that's just because my mom didn't know how delicious they were. She's always been a fan of cinnamon and sugar (she prefers it over chocolate)--so she'll definitely be getting a tin of these beauties.

I only slightly adapted this recipe from Something Swanky's White Chocolate Pretzel Snickerdoodles (which are divine, may I add). I omitted the white chocolate covered pretzels in favor of something a little more common and added white chocolate chips to the mix. These cookies are amazing with a cup of coffee.

I'm partial to this recipe because the cookies cook up beautifully and are just as soft and tender as any cookie that might call for cream of tartar. To ensure softness, ever so slightly under bake the cookies.

If you're packing these off for friends far, far away, sneaking a slice of bread into the container will help preserve the freshness and softness of the cookie. I don't recall where that tidbit of knowledge came from, but it's saved many a cookie from being "too hard".

One more note before the recipe: this recipe says it makes 48 cookies - but I found that using a medium-sized scoop yielded a softer and puffier cookie, and thus only made about 36 medium-sized cookies. We won't talk about why I had to make a second batch to ship off to my blogger matches...

Fine, it's because I snuck a bit of the dough. For taste testing measures only. I'll have you know, it was delicious.