Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Christmas Day Gingerbread Cookies



These cookies are thin and chewy, so if you like that kind of cookie, you'll really love these.  They are good for making vanilla ice cream cookie sandwiches, or you can frost them with buttercream. They have an interesting soft sugary crystalline texture because the sugar doesn't get creamed with the butter. If you can't have dairy, the butter can be replaced with margarine or Crisco and the recipe will still work, and then you could use 7-minute frosting to ice them.

Ingredients:

3 cups all purpose flour
3/4 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup white sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 rounded teaspoon ginger
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 sticks of soft butter 
1/3 cup mild molasses 
1 egg

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Mix the flour, sugars, spices and baking soda in you mixer first, then add the butter, molasses and egg. If you butter the measuring cup with one of the wrappers, the molasses will come out of the it easier. Mix the ingredients for a few minutes on medium speed until it looks combined. The dough will look and feel a little bit like wet sand.

Using a heaping teaspoon of dough at a time, roll each lump of  dough into a ball, then squash it flat into a round cookie shape. Place them on the cookie pan, spaced about an inch apart since they will spread out a little. Bake for ten minutes, then let the cookies rest on the pan for another two-four minutes or so, until they stiffen up enough to remove them with a spatula without messing them up. Because they are thin, they don't tell long to cool, so you can frost them after they sit on a cooling rack for about 15 minutes.