Triple ginger molasses cookies
I adapted these two recipes. Halving the recipe yields about 30 cookies.
Ingredients
- 1 cup butter, room temperature
- 1/2 cup (= 8 Tbsps) shortening
- 2 cups granulated sugar
- 2 Tbsps finely grated fresh ginger
- 2 Tbsps candied ginger, minced finely
- 2 eggs
- 3/4 cup of dark molasses
- 4-1/2 cups flour
- 1 tsp salt
- 4 tsps baking soda
- 1 Tbsp cinnamon
- 1 Tbsp ground ginger
- 1 tsp ground cloves
- turbinado sugar (enough for rolling)
Directions
1. Preheat oven to 360 degrees.
2. Combine flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon, ground ginger, and cloves in a bowl. Set aside.
3. Combine sugar, fresh ginger, and candied ginger. Sugar will become moist and fragrant and will clump up a bit.
4. Using an electric mixer, cream sugar with butter and shortening.
5. Add eggs and molasses and beat well until combined.
6. Add flour mixture and beat on lowest setting until incorporated.
7. Chill for at least one hour.
8. Form pieces of dough into 1-inch balls and roll in turbinado sugar.
9. Bake on parchment-lined cookie sheets for 8 to 10 minutes. Cookies will puff up and crack. The cracks should look wet, but the tops should look dry.
Notes
- I'm not sure if it's best to add the candied ginger to the sugar or the flour mixture. I think either way, the bits of candied ginger will get coated enough that they won't stick together. I had combined the candied and fresh ginger with the sugar a couple of weeks before making the cookie dough, and I loved how fragrant this made the sugar.
- Most similar recipes call for shortening. One of the ones I looked at had substituted butter for shortening. Shortening helps prevent a cookie from spreading in the oven (because it doesn't have the water content that butter does), but most web references I read noted that you lose a lot in flavor by using shortening. When halving the recipe, I used just 1/2 cup butter and 1/4 cup (or 4 Tbsps) shortening. The cookies did not spread as much as my chocolate chip cookies do, but this recipe also calls for more flour than the chocolate chip cookies recipe does. I'm not a fan of the idea of using shortening in cookies, so next time I'll try using only butter.
