Chewy Molasses Ginger Cookies

Just after I finished making a big batch of this dough, my heart sank. My family won’t like cookies with ginger and ohmygosh cloves. 

But the dough was ready, and I wasn’t going to throw it out. So I sat and shaped the cookies, all the while thinking about how nobody would eat them.

It’s a good thing I’m not a betting sort of woman, because I’d have lost big time. My little brother (notoriously unadventurous in the palate department) took one look at the cookies and said “Oh, yay! Snickerdoodles.” His mistake is understandable. They look a bit like snickerdoodles, with the crackly top and the sugar topping. But my tasters bit into the cookies, and far from the looks of horror I had expected, they were fighting over them-down to the last crumb!

Ingredients:

1 cup (2 sticks) butter or margerine

1 cup of sugar, plus more for rolling

1/2 cup of molasses

2 1/4 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1 1/4 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp ground cloves

1 tsp ground ginger

2 eggs

3 1/2 cups all purpose flour

Directions:

In the bowl of your mixer, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the molasses, baking soda, salt and spices, scraping down the sides to incorporate everything evenly. Stir in the flour. Cover and refrigerate for an hour, to make the handling easier.

Preheat oven to 350. Grease two cookie sheets. Shape the dough into 1 1/2 inch balls (approximately a tablespoon.) Roll the ball in sugar to coat, then place carefully on baking sheet. Leave 2 inches between cookies to allow for spreading.

Bake the cookies for 10 minutes. The cookies may not look completely done, but take them out anyway, they set as they cool. Allow to cool four 10 minutes on cookie sheet before transferring to a rack to cool completely.

Adapted from the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion