Call me crazy, but when I’ve had a long day, there’s something really satisfying about going home and baking cookies.
The dough is simple to throw together. They don’t take long in the oven. And they make the house smell heavenly.
These cookies are soft and chewy and oh-so-gingery.
About the method
These are really simple to make. Combine the wet ingredients. Then combine the dry ingredients. Add the dry ingredients to the wet, drop the cookies from a spoon onto a cookie sheet, and bake away.
Molasses Ginger Drop Cookies
2 sticks of butter, slightly soft (leave them on the counter for maybe 20 minutes)
3/4 cup white sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 jumbo eggs
1/2 cup molasses
3 cups flour
1 tsp. kosher salt
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
2 heaping Tbls. powdered ginger
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 cup heavy cream
Makes about 5 dozen 2-inch cookies.
Preheat your oven to 375 degrees. Line 2 sheet pans with parchment paper and set aside.
Combine the wet ingredients
Start with the butter. Cut it up into hunks and add it to the bowl of your mixer.
Toss in the white sugar and brown sugar. Beat on medium speed to combine.
Turn the speed up a little higher and keep beating until the mixture is light and fluffy.
Add the eggs and vanilla extract.
Beat to combine, then keep going until it’s light and fluffy. Your mixture should look about like this:
Add the molasses to the bowl and beat to combine.
You want your mixture to become uniform in color and texture, like this:
Set the mixer bowl aside for a minute while you deal with the dry ingredients.
Combine the dry ingredients
In a separate bowl, put the flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda, ginger, and cinnamon.
Whisk them together to combine evenly.
Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients
Scoop out about a cup of the dry ingredients. Add it to the wet ingredients in your mixing bowl.
Beat to combine. This will start to thicken up your dough so that it looks like this:
Pour in the heavy cream and beat to combine.
It should look about like this:
Add the rest of the dry ingredients and beat to combine completely (start the mixer on low, then increase the speed so that the flour doesn’t fly everywhere).
Your finished dough should look about like this. It will be pretty thick, but not so stiff that you won’t be able to drop it easily from a spoon. (Think the consistency of thick, creamy peanut butter.)
Drop the cookies and bake
Remove the bowl from the mixer stand. Using a small soup spoon, drop blobs of dough in even rows onto your prepared cookie sheets.
Bake in the oven for about 10 minutes. If you drop larger blobs of dough, bake them a few minutes longer.
Don’t worry about patting the dough down before it goes into the oven. The dough has enough butter in it that your round little blobs will flatten right out. After just a few minutes in the oven, you can see it starting to happen:
They’re done when they’re barely brown on the bottom and edges. Remove the pans from the oven and scoop the cookies immediately (be careful, they’re still a wee bit malleable when they’re super hot) onto a rack to cool.
Enjoy!
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Copyright 2008 The Hungry Mouse�/Jessica B. Konopa. All rights reserved.
