Snaps Not Folk

It pretty much happens every holiday season that we forget which cookie we’re making, and if you’ve ever tried to make a gingerbread house or gingerbread folk out of a gingersnaps recipe, well, you’ll get a quick reminder. There’s not enough flour and more molasses in a snap recipe, and the dough will not hold a cookie cutter shape, for love nor money. It’s a bit funny, really, to expect to be whipping up one cookie, and to have whipped up another.

Oops.

That’s what we get for pulling a recipe from our heads.

Nothing for it but to eat them. And then make some different ones for another day.

These cookies are strangely light when baked, and dark when raw, but cool to a delicious, chewy texture, which is made chewier and nuttier by the addition of a quarter cup of ground flax seed — or you can use a single egg. Just take:

• 2 C All Purpose Flour
• 1 Tablespoon, heaping, ginger
• 1 Tablespoon, heaping, freshly ground cinnamon
• 1 Tablespoon baking powder plus 1 tsp. baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• ~~~
• 1 C sugar, brown, lt. brown or raw – we used raw
• 1/4 C molasses (treacle, good people, is NOT molasses. No subs, here.)
• 3/4 C butter OR good quality margarine
• 1/4 C ground flaxseed OR 1 egg
• 1/3 C cinnamon sugar for rolling

You’ll need a small bowl, and a large one. – stir together your dry ingredients in the larger of the two, then cream together your sugar and oils in the smaller. Add your wet ingredients to the bowl with the dry, and stir until you get a sticky dough. We set ours aside for fifteen minutes, added an additional 2 Tbps. of flour (we find that we have to add more flour to recipes here in the UK — somehow, things are wetter. The air? The flour? Who knows.), and rolled the sticky dough out on a plastic-covered cutting board. We cut the dough into twenty-four little squares, rolled them in a rough mixture of raw sugar, refined sugar, and cinnamon, and baked them for ten minutes in a approximately 150°C/350°F oven. Look for cracked tops to indicate doneness.

And that’s all there is to it.

These are quick, chewy cookies that are very warming. Perhaps you don’t feel the need for warming desserts just now — nothing to go with a cup of tea, if you’re in the midst of a heatwave where you live. But did you know that eating hot foods — ginger, chilies, horseradish, wasabi — is good for you in hot weather? It makes you perspire with no effort, and encourages you to drink water. So — at about 3 a.m., when it’s cool enough to bake — whip up a batch of these cookies. You won’t regret it.

T.’s literary cousin Mary Lee gave us the most gorgeous fleur-de-lis cookie cutter — the “lis” reminds us of Mary LEE — and we fully intend to use it with our gingerbread folk recipe. Maybe for December Christmas instead of Christmas in July (a celebration which has had the dinner put off due to yet another wedding, but is on again for this weekend).

It’s Wednesday already! Hold on – the end of the week is coming soon.