Don't think this is turning into a recipe blog. It isn't. I don't really do enough cooking to keep up such an endeavor, but a few people have mentioned they like seeing recipes here so I am obliging with one more here today.

BIG SOFT GINGER COOKIES

INGREDIENTS:

1-1/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 TSP ground ginger
1 TSP baking soda
3/4 TSP ground cinnamon
1/2 TSP ground cloves
1/4 TSP salt

3/4 cup margarine, softened
1 cup white sugar
1 egg
1 TBSP water
1/4 cup molasses
2 TBSP white sugar (for coating)

DIRECTIONS

1. Preheat oven to 350 F (175 C). Sift together the flour, ginger, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves, and salt. Set aside.

2. In a large bowl, cream together the margarine and 1 cup of sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg. Stir in the water & molasses. Gradually stir the sifted ingredients into the molasses mixture. Shape dough into walnut-sized balls and roll them in the remaining sugar. Place the cookies 2 inches apart on an ungreased cookie sheet and flatten slightly.

3. Bake for 8-10 minutes in the preheated oven. Allow cookies to cool on baking sheet for 5 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool comopletely. Store in an airtight container.

Makes 24.

This particular recipe came from All Recipies Dot Com so I can't take any credit (or blame) for them myself. Well, maybe a tiny bit of blame.

Blame because as good as these cookies are to the taste, they are not hard or crunchy enough for me. But I have a dilemma where cookies are concerned. Paul likes soft chewy cookies and I prefer hard crunchy cookies. So in order to please us both, I'd have to make two batches, and after just one batch of completely messing up the kitchen with pots and pans and Silpat all over the place needing washing and putting away, when the cookies finally make it to the cooling racks, I am all IN!

Therefore, since the cookies in this house are mainly made for Paul, and not me, we went with the soft and chewy version.

Which is where the blame part comes in. They are too soft and chewy for my taste. I cooked them exactly per instructions, too. No longer, no less.

Where I have put words in italics above in the recipe, those are the places where I went off-recipe. I did make larger cookies than were called for. I got 17 cookies where the recipe says I should have gotten 24. Therein may lie one of the problems. Too big. Didn't cook long enough for their size. There was another small detail and that is that instead of one full cup of white sugar, I used 1/2 cup of white and 1/2 cup of dark brown sugar - just because I like brown sugar better than white.

I just remembered, I also forgot to flatten the cookie balls slightly before baking them! Oh my.

Oh yes, and there was one other thing I changed, I used butter instead of margarine. I don't own margarine at all here. I only buy butter. I do have a very large can of Crisco shortening, which may have been the way to go, but when I asked Paul to buy the Crisco at the store (he does my food shopping for me), I had specifically asked for "butter-flavor Crisco" and he came home with the biggest can of plain Crisco I have ever seen. So I am using that when needed, like to grease a baking dish. Using butter instead of margarine could have made a difference.

Also, my cookies didn't crack on the tops, like they are supposed to. I'm sure now that this is because of all the things I did wrong!

I guess the moral of this tale is that if you plan on making these Big Soft Ginger Cookies yourself, maybe you should follow the directions to the letter and not fiddle around with them like I always seem to do.

Live and learn.

Paul will probably love them. They are very chewy, almost to the point of being not quite cooked through. Which I don't really like. But that one little detail will keep me from scoffing them up myself and leave them all for him.

Cheers,

Bex