naamahdarling:

It is here!

These are PERFECT holiday cookies.

The name is probably Hideously Problematic ™ but at this point it is traditional and cannot be changed.

For the link-averse, here is the text:

Naamah’s Ginger Spice Cookies Ginger Sluts

Ingredients:

• ¾ cup vegetable shortening
• 1 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
• 1 large egg, beaten lightly
• ¼ cup unsulfured full-flavored dark molasses
• 2-5 tablespoons crystallized ginger, chopped at most to the size of mini chocolate chips (“optional” but without it they are not ginger sluts)
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger
• ½ teaspoon ground cloves
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• granulated sugar (or turbinado/demerara sugar) for dipping the balls of dough
• optional: black or cayenne pepper
• optional: for raw-dough safe cookies, or vegan cookies, substitute ¼ cup pumpkin and 1 teaspoon of baking powder*
• optional decoration: red and green sugar sprinkles

Preparation:

In a great big bowl, cream the shortening, brown sugar, molasses, and egg together until smooth. If you are adding pumpkin, do it now. 

If you are adding the crystallized ginger, add it now.

In a second bowl, mix the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and salt. Add any pepper or cayenne at this time. If you’re substituting pumpkin for egg, don’t forget your baking powder. When you measure the flour, use a tablespoon to add it to a measuring cup to be sure it has the proper loft, then level with a knife.

Add the flour mixture into the shortening mixture in several batches, stirring well. The finished cookie dough may be soft and may be stiff, depending on whether you used shortening in a stick (recommended, IMO) or shortening from a can (harder to stir). Either way, cover it and chill it for at least one hour.

Roll even tablespoons of the dough into balls and press one side of each ball into the turbinado or granulated sugar. Around Christmas I like to mix red and green sugar crystals with the dipping sugar, but these cookies look great with plain granulated sugar and best of all with coarse, caramel-colored turbinado or demerara sugar.

Arrange the balls well-spaced with the sugar sides up on greased baking sheets. They spread a lot! Bake them on the middle rack of a preheated 375°F oven for 10 or 12 minutes, or until the surface puffs up and then flattens way out. Keep an eye on them the first time you make them. Some oven configurations will produce a done cookie in only 8 minutes!

When ready they will be gingery-colored and cracked, like Mars. They’ll be a little poofy and soft but not gooey in the middle. Let them cool for a minute on the sheet (they will deflate a bit), then transfer to cooling racks with a metal spatula.

Take them out on the early side if you like chewy, soft cookies, on the late side if you want them a little crispier.

If you use strictly level tablespoons of dough, this recipe makes around 40 cookies. They will disappear much faster than you think. Don’t make them too big; as I said, they spread.

The raw dough is VERY good.

* I am not actually vegan, and so I have never actually made them this way; I can’t personally vouch for how well this works, as I’m going by alterations someone else made and then told me about.

Notes:

THESE CAN BE PRETTY HOT COOKIES. Depending on the quality of your crystallized ginger and your other spices, they can be too much for people who don’t like spicy food.  I’ve had two people tap out of the “hot” version I like.  Err on the lower end of any hot ingredients if you want to make something only gently spicy.  These are still wildly tasty without the crystallized ginger.

I adore richly-flavored spice cookies and if you do too, there are a few things I highly recommend adding to this recipe. Coarse turbinado/demerara/raw sugar for dipping adds a more rustic look and a little flavor. I use full-flavored dark molasses, and I never make these with anything other than dark brown sugar. This gives the cookies a great depth of flavor. Crystallized ginger is the perfect accent to these, as it candies up during baking and gives the baked cookies a wonderful texture and bursts of flavor. I suppose you could add too much candied ginger to these, but I have not managed to do this yet. I also like to give my flour mixture just a few twists of fresh-ground pepper or a pinch of cayenne about the size of the pad of my pinky finger. If you’re feeling frisky, try both.

Baked properly, these are the perfect medley of rich flavor and rewarding texture, and very fun to eat!

You can get Sugar in the Raw turbinado sugar at a lot of supermarkets, and Panera usually has little sugar packets of it you can tear into and check out if you’re curious how it tastes. It’s good stuff.