Currently baking out of Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook by Leslie Mackie
These cookies were the second half of my recent cookie bender. Unlike the peanut butter cookies, these cookies looked the worst but tasted the best.
I’m on the fence when it comes to ginger. Most of the time, I find the flavor to be overwhelming. But in these cookies, the ginger is very subtle. Instead of calling for powdered ginger, the recipe uses freshly grated, and I think that is the difference.
The molasses flavor is front and center. This isn’t the time for those weak, light molasseses. I used dark molasses and it was perfect.
This is another pretty standard cookie recipe, except the dough is very, very soft. I let the dough chill in the fridge for a couple of hours and it was still too soft to shape with my hands. Finally, I ended up scooping the dough into balls and freezing the balls until they were hard enough to handle. In the oven, the cookies spread quite a bit, developing a crisp edge with a soft, chewy center.
Did I mention how good these were?
A few days later, I made this recipe again, but meddled a bit (imagine that!). I added some lemon zest and cut down on the amount of leavening. This version was good, but the original is better. I think I’ll stick with that.
Ginger & Molasses is a favorite of Cindy’s. I bet she’d love these. Maybe I should try them sometime. I like to bake cookies but I like to eat them more. Hence my limiting of the baking. If I could freeze them in packages and eat them a little at a time, that’d be fine but when you eat a batch and drink a gallon of milk at a sitting, there’s bound to be troubles. Ha!
I had these cookies before I went on my last run to lose weight and oh lord were they good. So good. I had the ones from the first batch. Really hard to leave alone if they are in house.