Cookies & Spices & Stuff: A Rant and a Recipe

It's cookie baking season, and holiday festive meal cooking season, and so my newsfeeds are full of recipes and lists of foods and ideas.

And so, of course I am full of annoyance and opinions.

The recipe is at the end because it's bonus to the points of the post, not because I'm doing what so many cooking blogs do, which is make you scroll through screen after screen of extra stuff crammed between a zillion ads & glamour-shot photos of the kitchen & results to get to the basic ingredient list & mixing instructions.

I'm only gonna gripe about petty things that bother me first. Very easy to scroll past.

First, I'm really tired of the whole "baking versus cooking" fight.

One side says, "I like to cook anything BUT baking, baking is too complicated," and the other side insists, "Baking is so much easier, it's simple, cooking a whole meal on the stovetop is harder by far."

I am perpetually surprised by how often this dichotomy comes up in cooking conversations, because it's a nonsensical non-conflict. Yes, both activities involve ingredients and stoves or ovens, but in terms of comparison, it's like defending your love of rugby by saying soccer is harder. Or vice versa. Sure, they both involve fields & goals & teams, so, same-same, right? (LOLNOPE, and also I make no apologies for using a sportsing analogy. I am a nerd of many interests.)

ANYway. I like baking more, but not because cooking is harrrrrrrd.  Baking simply requires less protracted attention to things that will burn if I get distracted for an instant. (Because I am 100% certain to get distracted. Hello, stir fry anything...) And also because baking results in desserts, which I like better than proper food most days.

Which brings me (at last) to Point the Second, aka The Main Point: Spiciness

I have a major assortment of pet peeves about baking recipes, which fall into two broad categories:  unnecessary complications and the Midwestern American love affair with bland. I'm. only going to rant about the second one this time.

Cookie recipes never want you to put in enough spice. There. I said it.

I've heard several counterarguments. Lemma knock 'em down here.  Perhaps the recipes are perfect, but my spices are old, or low quality. Or perhaps my sense of taste & smell is at fault, and when I spice cookies to suit my palate, I am rendering the flavors harsh and overpowering to others with more sensitive sensibilities. (Here I'm feeling great sympathy for those Great British Baking Show contestants who get dinged for using any kind of extract.)

But I digress. And I have counters for all those counters. My spices are not wimpy. I buy Good Stuff (from assorted reliable retailers--always going small & local if I can with herbs & such-- and I don't let spices age on the shelf. Nor do I store them where they'll lose quality to heat or light.

FFS I grate nutmeg fresh from A Nutmeg, because ground stuff loses its flavor too fast for me. I have 2 kinds of cinnamon and 3 different varieties of vanilla, because I can taste the subtle difference between them & prefer one over others depending on recipe. No, the reality is that I just like more flavor in my baked goods than most recipes suggest. This isn't surprising when you consider how freaking EXPENSIVE spices were, historically. There's a meme about it somewhere I can't be arsed to hunt down, but it boiled down to, "You have a literal fortune in your kitchen cabinet if you have salt, pepper, and cloves up in there."

Based on that single data point, it's my utterly uninformed conclusion that recipes are designed more like the Recommended Daily allowances for nutrients (if you use less than this, Bad Things Happen) rather than being guides to the BEST amounts to use for peak results.

I'm not saying anyone else should bake the way I do. I'm just justifying my own practices to myself and the universe at large. Lucky you, eh, loyal reader?

ANYway. If a standard recipe calls for a teaspoon of vanilla, I routinely use two. Or three if I'm feeling self-indulgent. Other common baking spices...well, it varies. Cinnamon & ginger get bumped a good 50% minimum.  Nutmeg gets nudged up, and cloves...not at all, but that's also a personal thing. (I have a fraught relationship with clove due to the oil being widely used as a below-the-gum-line antiseptic in dental surgery. Which I have had a lot more of than I would prefer, in a perfect world.)

If you're wondering, any recipe that I share contains MY idea of the proper amount of spicing, not the original amounts from whatever recipe(s) I Frankensteined together to develop my own.

IT's one reason my recipes get way too wordy, with entirely too much explanation & not enough instructions.

This was a really long post to get to the part where I say, you might not want to put as much ginger into the following ginger cookie recipe as I do, as the results make for Very Zingy Gingery Mouthfuls.

Me, I think they're delicious that way. Excellent for settling the stomach after a big spicy bowl of chili, fo example. Not the easiest cookies to make, or the quickest, but 100% the best. The cookies stay chewy & fresh for DAYS, too.

And now, without further ado, The Best Ginger Cookies Ever, modified from a combo of a friends's molasses spice cookie recipe, my family's gingerbread recipe, and a cookie recipe I can't find online anymore.

Yes, that's how I used to write recipes for myself. Now I take phone snaps or screencap web pages. Since my photo program lets me search by image text, that's the fastest, most reliable way for me to find recipes I've archived. (Truly we live in an Age of Terrifying Wonders.) Here's a written out, slightly more coherent version: BEST GINGER DROP COOKIES EVER

1. DRY INGREDIENTS: Mix together the below ingredients in a bowl:

• 2 cups Flour
• 2 tsp baking SODA
• ½ tsp salt
• 1 heaping tsp ground ginger (at LEAST)
• 1+ tsp cinnamon
• ¼ tsp ground cloves

2. WET INGREDIENTS: In a mixer bowl, cream together the below ingredients--butters & sugars first, then add egg n molasses at once:

• ½ stick butter aka 4 tablespoons
• ½ of an 8 oz block of cream cheese aka 4 ounces
• ½ cup brown sugar (packed)
• ½ cup white sugar
• ¼ to ½ cup molasses
• 1 egg
• optional add-in: ½ cup diced candied ginger pieces.

(I always add the extra ginger. Because yum.

3. STIR IT ALL UP: Dump the bowlful of dry ingredients into the wet ingredients & mix until combined.

4. CHILL: Very important. At least 8 hours.

5. MAKE COOKIES: batch of apron 60 cookies at the recommended size. YMMV

• Preheat oven to at least 350º F. I usually do 375º, but my oven is quirky.
• Use parchment paper or silicone baking mats ot prepare to throw out a baking sheet.
• Scoop dough and make little balls 1 to 1.5 inches in diameter. Dough will be supersoft n sticky, easiest to handle while wearing nitric gloves or with wet hands.
• For awesome crackly-top results, roll each ball in sugar before setting on baking sheet
• Bake for 10 minutes +/- 2 minutes. Watch the first batch like a hawk, look for the crackle top & the slight darkening of the brown color.

This recipe, like our Traditional Family Holiday Sugar Cookie recipe, does really well as a freezer cookie; roll chilled dough into parchment paper, tuck into a ziplock & thaw just enough dough for a small batch at a time. It's hard to resign myself to sacrificing some dough to stickiness, but it's worth it to have hot, yummy, zingy-sweet morsels in the depths of January, long after the holiday cheer has fizzled.

Festive Yule & Romjul to all.