'Tis the season for baking up some yummy spice cookies!
I really wanted to make some ginger spice cookies, but I was seriously lacking ingredients. I had no butter and no molasses, which are both pretty key ingredients in most ginger spice cookie recipes... believe me... I searched!
I didn't find a recipe that would fit in with the ingredients I had on hand and, did I mention? I
really wanted to make some ginger spice cookies.
OK. I probably would have been happy with making any kind of cookie, so perhaps I should re-word that.
I
really wanted to
eat some ginger spice cookies.
That little fact played a huge role in coming up with this super yummy recipe!
I mixed up some ingredients... and some spices... and started baking. The dough was sticky to work with. I won't lie. It was kind of a mess. If I'd have had a bit more patients, I probably could have refrigerated it a while and it would have been a bit easier to work with. But no. I trudged on.
Once I was ready to bake the cookies, I put a couple in to see how they would do. They stayed puffed up and rounded. I needed to flatten them. By this time I was really getting impatient. I mean, don't get me wrong... I did eat the puffed up round ones... you know, quality control and all. But they were YUMMY and I wanted more!
I loaded my pan up with balls of dough, then I took a fork and dipped it in sugar and flattened the cookie dough a bit. You know, like you do with peanut butter cookies. I had to re-dip in sugar between each flattening because, like I said before, the dough was sticky. It worked ok, though. See?
They just aren't as pretty as I would have liked. It wasn't until I made a second batch a few days later (I
told you they are yummy!) that a "duh" moment struck me. Dip the bottom of a glass in sugar and use it to flatten the dough. It worked much better. Just look at the picture at the top of this post.
Prettier, right?
If you have a sharp eye and can tell (despite my crummy photography skills), you'll notice that the cookies in the top photo are slightly lighter than the other photos. Let's just say that this is a forgiving cookie. I didn't realize that I had almost no brown sugar left. I had half of the recipe made and ready to go. Oops! I used what brown sugar I had and I made up the rest with regular ol' white sugar. It worked pretty well! Sure, that batch lacked the richness that a brown sugar gives to a cookie, but if you didn't know it was supposed to be there, you wouldn't even be able to tell that something was missing.
While these cookies are perfectly tasty as is, I would love to try them with a glaze.
A cream cheese frosting glaze.
With a bit of orange zest mixed in.
Yum!
My family loves these cookies, and I hope yours will too! (Yes! Of course I am sharing the recipe!)
