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Thursday, January 12, 2012

Gingerbread.

Lately I've been having the biggest craving for gingerbread cookies. In my mind I have this perfect vision of what a gingerbread cookie ought to be, but this probably differs vastly from what everyone sees, smells, and tastes. 


When I think of my perfect gingerbread cookie, I think of something intense, spicy, warm, with a faint sweetness that isn't overpowering. I want it to be something delicate and special, not a brick. It's not a crunchy cookie, but it isn't something that falls apart either. I envision an initial chewiness that ends up melting away in your mouth anyway. And above all, I want it to be thick, like thicker than most gingerbread men thick.






I don't have a go to recipe for gingerbread cookies, so I turned to SmittenKitchen and her adapted recipe from none other than Martha Stewart herself. But I wasn't satisfied and ended up looking to 7 other go-to sites for their gingerbread cookie recipes. I finally settled on this one from Sophistimom. SmittenKitchen's cookies look like a dream, but perhaps a bit too unyielding. Sophistimom's remind me of snickerdoodles, which isn't exactly what I'm going for, but they seem to work perfectly for her. The texture that I'm thinking of is somewhere in the middle--time to math away and combine the two.


I tone down some of the spices that both recipes call for, opt for the orange zest, and scale down the sugar content in both. I keep mostly with the Smitten variety, because I'm a fan of how well those keep up, but I add more butter to it, since I want them to be a little softer, and because we could all use more butter in our lives. I also used honey in this batch as opposed to molasses which made them a lot lighter in color.


The dough ends up being pretty sticky to handle, but not unruly. Definitely let the dough chill before rolling it out. I didn't have too much trouble, but it would have been much easier if I'd waited longer. 


I like them straight out of the oven with a little bit of generic icing on top. If you let them cool, they get a bit of a crunch on the edges, which isn't too bad. Next time I might tweak it to add the slightest bit of applesauce or sour cream or I might actually use the molasses that I was supposed to use; they are by no means dry, but I think I was hoping for a portable piece of cake. The good thing about these, is they have just the right flavor, except with none of the crazy richness. They don't leave me feeling like I just had a spiced up pancake, but the flavor is very much so present. 




 Gingerbread
3 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoons ground cloves
1/2 teaspoons nutmeg
Pinch of salt
Zest of 1 orange
1 tablespoons freshly grated ginger
3/4 cup (1.5 sticks) unsalted butter (at room temperature)
1 teaspoons Vanilla extract
1/2 cup packed dark-brown sugar
1 large eggs
1/2 cup unsulfured molasses

You know the drill. Mix the dries with the dries and the wets with the wets. Combine. Chill. Bake at 325 for 10 minutes or until they look good. 

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