Simple Food Ginger Snaps

The next step in my Gingerbread Odyssey is a tour through the gingerbread or ginger cookies in my ever-growing cookbook collection. These days I almost have more cookbooks than I know what to do with, and certainly more than I really know well. I'm very excited to use the my gingerbread explorations as an opportunity to better know some of the more obscure or underused. I also plan to use this as an opportunity for mini-reviews.
That said, my first attempt was from a new favorite, the already broken-spined The Art of Simple Food. This elegant new book from Alice Waters is full of straightforward, readable recipes for what Waters at least considers basic preparations. It's as approachable as most of the Chez Panisse cookbooks can be intimidating, and I use it all the time. Desserts are not the book's strong point, but it covers Waters' basics, including the gingersnap recipe also featured in my favorite children's cookbook and fantasia, Fanny at Chez Panisse. I would hazard a guess that these cookies made or make frequent appearances at the restaurant, as they are also the recipe that David Lebovitz, a former Chez Panisse dessert chef, chose to feature in his book review for Simple Food.
The snaps were good, not great. Next time I would up the spice and possibly make the dough a little dryer, it was difficult to work with. At first, I tried rolling out the dough, but that was so difficult that I did my second batch as a freezer roll, and had better success. These aren't the holy grail of cookies, but there is one thing that they do very well indeed, so well that it's pointed out everywhere that the recipe appears, and that is...
Ice cream sandwiches. I adapted David Lebovitz's passion fruit ice cream recipe to a mango-lemon version, and tried a new method for filling the sandwiches. Usually I just scoop a spoonful onto the bottom cookie, press on the top, and wrap tightly in plastic wrap. That method is a little messy, and doesn't create the precise little sandwiches I prefer (yes, I'm all Martha about my ice cream sandwiches). This time I poured the soft ice cream onto waxed paper in a 3/4 inch layer in a pan, and cut out circles with a biscuit cutter once it had hardened, and this was successful enough that it will be my new go-to method. And they were delicious, best after defrosting for ten minutes or so.

Ginger Snaps
From The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution (Clarkson Potter) by Alice Waters, adapted from David Lebovitz's adaptations.

• 2 cups (280 g) flour
• 1½ teaspoons baking soda
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1½ teaspoons ground ginger
• ½ teaspoon ground black pepper
• 11 tablespoons (150 g) butter, salted or unsalted, at room temperature
• 2/3 cup (130 g) sugar
• ½ teaspoon vanilla extract
• ¼ cup (80 g) mild-flavored molasses* (sometimes called 'light' molasses)
• 1 large egg, at room temperature

1. Stir together the dry ingredients.

2. Beat the butter just until soft and fluffy. Add the sugar and continue to beat until smooth.

3. Stir in the vanilla, molasses and egg.

4. Mix in the dry ingredients gradually until the dough is smooth.

5. Divide the dough in two equal portions and roll each on a lightly-floured surface until each is about 2-inches (5cm) around. Don't worry if they're not perfect; you can neaten them up in a second.

6. Wrap each in plastic wrap then roll them lightly on the counter to smooth them out. Refrigerate, or better yet, freeze the cookie logs until firm.

7. To bake, preheat the oven to 350F (180C) and line two baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone baking mats.

8. Slice cookie dough into 1/4-inch (a scant 1 cm) rounds with a sharp knife. Dip one side and press firmly in a bowl of coarse sugar if you want (you can also use granulated sugar instead), and place sugar-side up on baking sheet, evenly-spaced apart. Leave a couple of inches, about 5 cm, between cookies since they'll spread while baking.

9. Bake for 10-14 minutes, rotating the baking sheets midway during baking, until deep-golden brown. The cookies will puff up a bit while baking, then settle down when they're done. Bake on the lower end of the range for softer cookies, and more for snappier ones (I'd suggest going for snappy if you want ice cream sandwiches), depending on your oven.

10. Let the cookies cool two minutes, then remove them with a spatula and transfer them to a cooling rack.


Mango Ice Cream
Adapted from The Perfect Scoop, by David Lebovitz

• 1/2 cup mango puree (put mango in food processor, whir...)
  
• 1 cup heavy cream (I subbed some with milk)
  
• 6 Tbl whole milk (I used skim)
  
• 7 Tblsp. sugar
• pinch of salt
• 3 large egg yolks
• orange zest (meyer lemon) or lemon oil

Mix mango and 1/2 the cream, set aside.
Warm milk, sugar, salt, remaining cream in saucepan, whisk the yolks in nearby bowl. Add a bit of warm milk to eggs to temper, whisk eggs into warm milk, heat until custard coats the back of a spoon. Stir custard into remaining cream/mango mix, add zest. Chill and put in ice cream freezer.

Black Dog Bootleg

For the next installment in the Gingerbread Report, I make some fairly mediocre cookies. In the comments from the opening post of the Gingerbread Report, my mother mentioned that her favorite ginger cookie is from The Black Dog on Martha's Vineyard. You know, the one with the ubiquitous t-shirts.

Not having been lucky enough to set foot on Martha's Vineyard in the last many years, I don't have a clear memory of what those cookies were like, (although I do have a vivid memory of sugar raised doughnuts on the ferry out), but I was able to locate a bootleg version of the recipe here, taken (I can't say how accurately) from The Black Dog: Summer on the Vineyard Cookbook.

This recipe, and other versions of it I was able to find, utilizes an interesting technique. Instead of using powdered ginger in the dry ingredients and butter as the fat, The Black Dog recipe blends fresh ginger with oil, steeps, and then uses the oil and discards the ginger. I chose not to discard the ginger, and added it also, along with a little extra powdered ginger for luck.

I halved this recipe and made huge cookies and still managed to make a lot, so keep that in mind if you decide to go for it.

Reasons I'm not sure you should go for it: Well, one reason, really. The recipe just didn't quite work. As written, it was too dry to even form into hard balls, and it was only after adding more egg and some more oil that I got the cookies on the left:
In a retrospectively unwise move, I decided to see what would happen if I added more egg and oil still, and a bit of milk. When it got too wet, I dried it out with tapioca starch. The first result was the cookie on the right, wetter, cakier. When things got really weird, I wound up with this:
The first batch, (the hard dry ones), were the best, but weren't all that exciting, so I won't post the recipe. A worthy experiment, but I wish I'd quartered the recipe.

If my mother or anyone else with a good memory and a fondness for the New England coast can describe The Black Dog version, I'd have a better sense of whether the recipe hit the mark.

Gingerbread Report

I feel like I spend my whole life playing catch-up and apologizing. This has to stop. It is time to manage time well and plan projects that can be completely thoroughly and successfully, with my whole heart. This half-assed last minuteness is not doing it for me, at all, it makes my house filthy and my friends neglected and my voice apparently passive. No more.

It is in the spirit of whole-hearted thorough investigation that I bring you my newest baking plan, a scholarly study complete with spreadsheets, the Gingerbread Report.

Abstract:
While a devoted fan of all things gingerbread, molasses, and spicy (do they let you in to New England without a love of molasses?), I have never quite isolated the perfect ginger-molasses cookie recipe. The subtle balance of butter to egg to flour to flavor that makes a cracked, spicy, chewy wonder every time has always eluded me. This spring, I am resolved to deal with the problem once and for all, by baking every reputable recipe I can get my hands on for ginger cookies, ginger-molasses cookies, and gingerbread, and creating the definitive guide to all things ginger-molasses. Since I and everyone I know loves ginger-molasses cookies, this shouldn't be a serious hardship, but it is going to be rigorous.

Methodology:
Recipes will be selected from a variety of online and print sources, and will be catalogued in a master spreadsheet by ingredients and method. All recipes will be posted here on the blog, with careful accreditation and link (if possible) to their original source. I will try to note unusual combinations or interesting ratios, and to stick as closely to the original recipe as possible (spices are exempt, almost all recipes are too chicken on this point for me). A round-up at the end of the run will summarize findings.

Literature Review: (so far)

Curtis & Schwartz Cookbook's Ginger Molasses Cookies
My old standard. These are easy, reliable, and reasonably adaptable for different baking conditions (rolled cookies, cakier, softer). I've made them hundreds of times--they were probably what started me making ginger cookies in the first place. I've never been able to quite pin down what made them so perfect in the given link. They've never been like that before nor since. If they had, I wouldn't be doing this project.

Tartine's Soft Glazed Gingerbread
From the book from the bakery. San Francisco's Tartine comes up a lot on blogs, but I came to this recipe in a roundabout way, printed it out, saved it for months, and found it when I was cleaning out my office last weekend. Made it, as simply as possible, no glazing of any sort. Spicing was perfect, but perfect. Texture is like flat gingerbread (the cake kind). Needed something. Not sure just what. I may have put in a touch too much egg. This, though, is very very good. Highly recommended, I'm using it as my spice guide now.

King Arthur Flour's Soft Molasses Cookies
These strong spicy molasses-rich cookies are are unusual in that they have no egg in the recipe, and do contain 1/3 cup of rum (I subbed rye whiskey, usually the only hard alcohol I have around in quantity). I upped the spices considerably, but left everything else the same--I'll give you the recipe spiced as KA intended it with my notes. These were very showy cookies (they are the ones pictured in this post) with good texture. Not perfect, which might have something to do with butter, they had only about half of what this amount of cookies would usually have. Good recipe for those times with no fresh eggs and a cupboard full of dry goods. The dough was very sticky. I mixed in a little egg in the second round of cookies, just to see what it would do.
Here is without egg:
Here is with egg:
And here they are side by side:
Not a huge difference, but the egg-free ones looked better and the egg added nothing, so I'd have to conclude that the bakers up in Vermont had the right of it.

Recipe follows after the jump.

Soft Molasses Cookies ("Joe Froggers")
Adapted from the King Arthur Flour website

2 cups (8 1/2 ounces) King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
1 teaspoon ginger
1/4 teaspoon cloves
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
5 tablespoons (2 1/2 ounces) unsalted butter
1/2 cup (3 1/2 ounces) sugar
1/2 cup (6 ounces) molasses
1/3 cup (2 1/2 ounces) dark rum

Whisk together the flour, spices, salt and baking soda, and set aside. In a large bowl, beat together the butter and sugar, then beat in the molasses. Add the dry ingredients alternately with the rum.

Using a cookie or muffin scoop, scoop out round balls of dough somewhere in size between a ping-pong ball and a golf ball, and place the balls on a parchment-lined or lightly greased baking sheet. Bake the cookies in a preheated 375°F oven for 11 to 12 minutes, until they crack on top but haven't yet browned around the edges. Yield: eighteen 3-inch cookies.

TWD Returns: Fresh Ginger and Chocolate Gingerbread

What with all the Christmas and the Africa and all, it's been a while since I've been able to participate in Tuesdays with Dorie, the weekly baking group working its way through Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From my home to yours. Looks like I missed a few good things, too (pear tart!) so I might go back and catch up, but probably not. I'm trying to minimize the actual presence of dessert in the house, which sadly may impair my baking capacity. More likely I'll just be giving even more away. I have some freelance jobs that are resulting in a larger diversity of cake-eaters in the workplace, so I have more outlets.

This week's recipe was Fresh Ginger and Chocolate Gingerbread. Frequent readers may have noticed that I have no problem whatsoever with any kind of gingerbread or spice cake, nor does anyone living in my house. I don't see any particular reason to add chocolate, but was happy to do so for this experiment. I made half the recipe, used powdered and fresh ginger but not the optional preserved stem ginger. I subbed in a mixture of yogurt, creme fraiche, and milk for the buttermilk, and a scoop of pumpkin butter for half an egg. I forgot to mix in the shaved chocolate so I just sprinkled it all on top of the batter in the oven. It was very good. Matt ate it with yogurt--pictured above.

Also, home decor proceeds apace. Matt is bringing home lamps like it's his job, and our house is starting to take on semblances of order. I brought some beautiful fabric home from Uganda, and now we have a tomato tablecloth.

Family Winter Holiday Macarons

Happy Chanukah!
Or as my friend Stacey would say, Happy Family Winter Holiday!

I love Chanukah, and have already had two latke parties to go to, which is a very good thing. Fried potatoes are excellent. Chanukah is also a great time to remember that one man's religious extremist terrorist is another man's Maccabee. (The way most people tell it, the Maccabees were fighting for their own right to religious expression, which had been outlawed, rather than trying to impose on others, but the point is historically dicey.) Just makes you think.

But when I think, I like to think about light. And miracles. Two years ago on Chanukah, crushed and lonely, I bested my better judgment and called Matt and asked him to tell me again about his theory of the third night. He believes that there is a tipping point for miracles, the moment when the miracle hits the mind, when it starts to dawn on everyone that this is more than just some high quality oil or a really good rainbow. He was surprised to hear from me (maybe) but he told me all he could, and when I asked, promised to round out the religious instruction with a multi-borough Christmas tree tour.

Somewhere in the cold wind and rain and snow of that winter, another miracle happened, and we found ourselves able to find each other again. Christmas and New Year are special times for us--fraught with darkness and fear and light and miracles.

This year, I'm leaving town for both holidays, flying on Christmas day to see my little sister in Uganda, where it's hot and modest. I won't be back until mid-January. Part of the trip anxiety, or just my wish to cram everything in, has been an immodest amount of cooking and baking. (I have to leave Matt well-fed, don't I? Actually, I know he's looking forward to a little unsupervised time to get to know the kitchen.)

I made lasagne and spanikopita, braised ribs and roasted chicken, and produced a large number of cookies. There were world peace cookies and there were NY Times chocolate chip cookies, and then there were these:
These are gingerbread macarons, from Tartelette. Macarons are notoriously temperamental to make, and the proper hard shell with a little fuzzy 'foot' on the bottom can be hit or miss. In fact, the first time I made this recipe, which mixes ginger, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg into the dry ingredients, the taste was great but the shape was a flop. (No disrespect to Tartelette, I have a feeling my conversions were off.)

I re-made the recipe the following morning using the recipe I've had best results with, David Lebovitz's. I just omitted the chocolate powder and didn't replace it, helping the dough to remain a little wetter. These held their perfect shape and I filled them with gingerbread buttercream. I brought them to one of the aforementioned latke parties and one guy fell for both kinds, exclaiming over and over that they were different, but he liked both.

Today, I mixed it up a little, and made plain nutmeg macarons with a filling made of cream, chestnut jam from Chile (thanks Miriam), and the leftover gingerbread buttercream. Here they are:
They look just like little UFOs, don't they?
The filling was great, and as a bonus, they are gluten-free, so I can give them to my aunt.

I love sweet things in my mouth and sweet things in my life. These are the dark days of the year, but I feel very lucky and well lit.