Big, Soft Ginger Cookies

My girlfriend Lindsey came over last night with a mission: she needed 24 cookies to take to a cookie exchange. We needed to find a good recipe to match our skills and palettes. We wanted something slightly festive, not too challenging and I wanted something with little decorating (as we have recently seen my success with that).

The recipe I found met all our criteria. With a title like Big, Soft Ginger Cookies, how could you go wrong? I found them on www.allrecipes.com, my favourite place for recipes because you can read feedback from real people and how they fared with the recipe and what changes they made. More than 2,000 people gave it five stars. They can add two more to the list!

We doubled the recipe and it made 52 cookies. Below is the regular recipe (which will yield about 26 delicious cookies)

Ingredients

• 2 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 butter, softened
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tbsp orange juice (the recipe called for water but a reader said oj was the way)
• 1/4 cup molasses
• 2 tbsp white sugar

Directions

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees
• Sift together flour, ginger, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves and salt. Set aside
• In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugar. Beat in egg. Stir in OJ and molasses
• Gradually stir in dry ingredients into molasses mixture

• Leave mixture in fridge for about 30 minutes to cool
• Shape dough into Timbit sized balls and roll them in the remaining sugar (this will make them all sparkly and festive)

• Put cookies on sheet two inches apart and flatten slightly
• Bake for 8 - 10 minutes
• Eat!

(please note beloved mixer in the background)