Gingersnaps

To me, a gingersnap is dark in colour, molasses-y, gingery, and coated in sugar. One of my baking buddies posted a picture of this week’s assignment a few days early, and I was surprised to see something very… pale. Not that there’s anything wrong with pale – I’m married to a ‘ginger,’ after all – it was just unexpected. Apparently, in the UK, a gingersnap is made with melted butter & golden syrup, and caster sugar or golden baker’s sugar? No molasses, no brown sugar. Since I had no idea what either caster sugar or golden baker’s sugar were, I poked around both the regular baking aisle, plus the organic section (where I normally find another Rose favourite, muscovado sugar), and did a little Google search right there in the grocery store, and settled on this:

It looked a little coarse, compared to what was described on the Interwebs, but I figured I could always grind finer it in my food processor… which I did, but it didn’t really get all that fine, and, while I have nothing to compare it to, I think it turned out just “fine” anyway. 😉

The first step, aside from grinding your sugar (if you feel the need to do so), is to melt the butter and golden syrup. Then let that cool, while you measure the rest of the ingredients.

That was fast.  Ok, now mix the dry together, lightly beat the egg, then put the butter & golden syrup into the flour, mix until it’s the texture of wet sand…

…then add the egg, mix a little bit more, and you’ve got your dough.

I did the steps above on Friday night, then on Saturday afternoon, while my husband was working on patching drywall where we’d pulled off the trim in our bedroom, I baked them.

My cookie scoop turns out to result in gingersnaps weighing 21 g, so I just went with that, rather than fussing about getting them all to 27g, like the recipe called for. The recipe also calls for rolling the dough into little balls, and… well, I tried that on one of the batches. See if you can spot the difference:

I can tell the difference, but only visually, and just barely at that.

Jay asked me this afternoon what my plan was, with these cookies.  “Eat them?” “You’re not planning on taking them to work?” “Nah, why? Do you like them?” “They’re wonderful.” I liked them, too. Crispy outside, chewy inside, and they seem to be staying nice and soft the next day. They’re dangerously addictive, and definitely going to be a regular in my cookie rotation.