Before I get to the cookies, I’m going to make an important announcement about the future of Sugar Mountain Treats. Try not to skip to the good part.

We’ve been experiencing some growing pains around here recently, and during my two-week trip to Italy, in between teaching 40 students how to cook pasta dishes, I thought a little bit about how I want the site to grow and develop. It’s been almost six months since my first post, so it seems like just the right time for some self-reflection.

Some parts of the blog have been fantastic. I’ve loved getting comments and input on recipes. It makes my day every time I get a message from someone saying that they made a recipe from my blog and it came out well. And that new year’s resolution (which I might have mentioned, I don’t know, a few dozen times already) to try and make up more of my own recipes? That’s been going incredibly well. I feel so much more confident and creative already.

But there are some that I’m not completely happy with. My first posts, the ones I wrote before we even went live, were all far better-written than many of the ones I’ve been posting recently, which often sound terse and stressed. To me, at least. I’m also not totally thrilled with the speed at which my photos are improving, so it would be nice to have some time to work on that. Basically, the underlying theme here is: I need to spend more time working on individual posts. But I also have a dissertation to write. I keep mentioning that, but really, it’s true. These things don’t just magically appear, much as I might wish they did.

So, the TL;DR is: we’re scaling back in quantity of posts, but hopefully improving the quality. I’m suspending Scone Sundays for the time being, because I posted a ton of scones and now I’m a little sconed-out. Instead, this is my new plan for the time being: starting in July, on as many Mondays as I can I’ll post completely (or nearly completely) SMT-original recipes. On every Wednesday, I’ll post original photos of recipes I’ve made from other blogs that turned out amazingly well, and I’ll just link you straight to their version of the recipe. After all, if I didn’t make any changes, I’m probably wasting my time rewriting the recipe in my own words. And on some Fridays, I’ll post recipes from blogs or cookbooks that I’ve adapted enough that I need to rewrite the recipe for you. I won’t post every Monday and Friday, but on the days when I do post, that will be the schedule I follow. On days when I don’t post a blog entry, I’ll still probably put something up on my SMT facebook page, so check regularly!

You’ll also see some other changes around here, as soon as I can get my web designer (aka husband) to work on them. I’m hoping for drastically improved archive pages and more images per post. That’s a little ways down the line, though.

I’m really excited about these changes and how I’ll be able to improve the quality of the content I post here. I hope that you continue to enjoy my treats!

 

Now, the cookies. When I mentioned the idea of a peanut butter oatmeal chocolate chip cookie to a friend, he got slightly dreamy-eyed and said, “That’s like every good kind of cookie rolled into one!” I laughed and told him that was kind of the point, but in my mind I was thinking, “That can’t be true. What about snickerdoodles?” So I rolled the cookies in cinnamon-sugar, and, lo and behold, they were awesome. To the surprise of absolutely nobody.