Hi there, and welcome!


This is a completely different post than usual as this will be the very first recipe I post! Now I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty damn excited.

As the title has already revealed, this is a recipe for ginger cookies. The story behind the intense part of the title is that my sister and I tried for the first time ever to make a badge of ginger cookies, and we were so excited to taste them! Unfortunately they did not taste as much of ginger as we had aimed for – even though we doubled the amount of fresh ginger to the original recipe!
The cookies were good, it’s not that, we had just imagined a more intense ginger taste. So with that in mind, I put four times the amount of fresh ginger in than instructed, and on top of that, doubled the amount of ground ginger. So if this badge isn’t intense ginger cookies, I don’t know what is happening to the world!

Okay, enough with the babbling, lets get to it!

You will need an electrical whisk (or manual, if you’re more into the manual labor, that’s completely up to you!), two medium sized bowls for mixing, a knife, a small cutting board, a cup measurement, and lastly: a couple of tablespoons and a teaspoon.

Ingredients:

  •  3/8 cup butter, room temperature
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 2 tablespoons barley malt syrup (or molasses)
  • 1/4 cup water
  • 3/4 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/8 teaspoon salt
  • 2 teaspoons ground ginger
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
  • 2 tablespoons chopped, fresh ginger

Instructions:

  • In one of your bowls, mix together butter and sugar until it gives you a white-ish mixture
  • Add syrup, and stir together. (This can be quite messy… take it from someone who has tried it)
  • Now add the water, and baking soda, and mix. (It doesn’t matter that most of the water will separate from your previous mixture, this will happen when you add your dry ingredients later on)
  • In a different bowl, mix together the rest of your dry ingredients (i.e flour, salt, ground ginger, ground cinnamon, ground nutmeg, and ground cloves)
    • Some people like to sift the dry ingredients to get rid of any lumps, but to be honest I hate cleaning a sifter, so I take my teaspoon and give it a good mix instead (Go team lazy!)
  • Add dry ingredients to your previous mixture of butter, sugar, syrup, water, and baking powder. Mix together gradually to avoid flour going everywhere (unless this is something you find amusing.. I mean.. you do you)
  • When your mixture is smooth, add the chopped ginger, and do one final mix.

Voila! Your mixture is all done! You might notice that the dough is not as hard as you might want a cookie dough to be, not to be worried!
If you’re making your cookies straight away, just add a bit of flour until you get the dough as you prefer. Otherwise put the dough in the fridge for an hour or two, and it will harden a bit, all the while the flavor will intensify. I have decided to leave my dough in the fridge for a couple of days, as my aim is to get that intense ginger flavor to stand out.

Baking:

  • Preheat oven to 350ºF or 176ºC
  • Form dough into balls of preferred size
  • Place onto baking sheet with some distance between.
    • I prefer using two tablespoons to pick up, and shape the dough. It keeps my hands from getting gross, and makes it very easy to get the same size for all the cookies.
  • Flatten your balls (hehe) of dough slightly before putting into the oven, as they will not flatten too much on their own.
  • Bake for 10-ish minutes. You know your oven the best, so you’ll have an idea of how hard it bakes

A post-baking-note:

I ended up leaving the dough in the fridge for a full week. The flavor came out really good and intense as I wanted it to, so I got that one going for me! However, the cookies came out a bit soft, which can be really nice – don’t get me wrong! But I have some batter left, and next time I’ll try and bake them at a lower temperature for a while longer, hoping that they will get nice and crispy, as I think ginger cookies should be. Of course everyone has a different taste; My mom for example, really enjoyed that the cookies were soft! So you do you!

 

I hope you liked this post, and who knows, maybe I’ll give it another go at some different recipes! We’ll see how it goes.

As always, you can find me on pinterest, where I pin on a regular basis. Currently I’m starting to try out tofu, and have dedicated a board just for tofu recipes. If you are interested in that, click here.

Find me on instagram where I post.. well… often

For today’s musical element, I have chosen this quirky little song.

xClara