White Chocolate Gingersnaps

Bring on the peppermint, ginger and sparkling sugar because holiday baking season is upon us my friends. And with the short season between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I’ve got a lot of holiday recipes to fit in to the next few weeks. So don’t get any crazy ideas like post-Thanksgiving diets, because there is a lot of sugar coming your way the next month. My baking drawer is literally overflowing after another unnecessary trip to Target this morning. That’s a trick statement, any trip to Target is  necessary.

So what better way to kick off holiday baking than going for an amped up gingersnap? I was browsing the interwebs for some different twist on a gingersnap and came across these on one of my favorite blogs TwoPeasandTheirPod. I also wanted to test out my new sugar coating technique that I adapted from my girl Martha Stewart. Normally I am not a Martha fan because her recipes tend to be unnecessarily complicated. Like refrigerate the dough at 37 and a half degrees for 293 minutes and top with a dash of organic yeast from the top of Mount Everest. Unnecessary Martha, unnecessary. But for once in her life, M-stizzle decomplicated the time-consuming process of rolling cookies in sugar before baking them. Flatten the cookie down with your hand or a lightly floured glass, sprinkle some sugar on top, brush with a little water, and sprinkle with some more sugar. Bam. Much faster, and it creates an amazing crunchy sugar glaze of love on top.

Ingredients:

  • 1 cup butter, softened
  • 1 cup granulated sugar
  • 1/2 cup molasses
  • 2 tablespoons canola oil
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 2 large eggs
  • 2 1/4 teaspoons baking soda
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 1/4 teaspoons cinnamon
  • 1 1/4 teaspoons ground cloves
  • 1 teaspoon ground ginger
  • 3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 1/2 cups white chocolate chips

Step 1: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Cream butter and sugars together. Add molasses, canola oil and vanilla extract and mix until well incorporated. Add eggs and mix well.

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Step 2: In a separate bowl, sift cinnamon, salt, cloves, ginger, and flour. Add to the wet mixture and mix on low.

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Step 3: Add in white chocolate chips (maybe even throw in a few extra) and mix on low

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Step 4: Use a medium-cookie scoop and place even-size balls of dough on a parchment or sil-pat lined baking sheet. Press the cookie down lightly to flatten it either with your palm or a glass dipped lightly in flour. Sprinkle some granulated sugar on top of each cookie, then brush lightly with water, and sprinkle another dash of sugar on top. Trust me, Martha knows what she’s doing.

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Step 5: Bake at 350 degrees for 10-12 minutes. These will be very soft when they come out of the oven so let them settle a bit on the tray before you transfer them to a cooling rack.

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And there you have it. Throw on Mariah Carey’s christmas classics and bake yourself some of these. My house smells like angels right now. Gingersnap angels. And to be perfectly honest with you, since I think we’re on that level, I actually forgot to put ginger in these. I realized it when I was writing this post. So I will be bringing these sham gingersnaps to work tomorrow, but Colleen gave them two thumbs up and we all know her opinion is the only one that matters here.

Right now we are consoling our broken hearts with these gingersnaps since after starting Friday Night Lights back during the Nemo snowstorm in February, we just finished the series tonight. No more Coach Taylor, no more Tim Riggins. We feel empty. We are empty. And only these gingersnaps can fill the void. Texas forever.

I ventured to the hood for Thanksgiving, or as some people call it, southern Connecticut. I assure you, it’s straight thug life down there. I went to Chili’s twice in two days. I also looked up a lot of really intriguing questions for my Grandpa on the internet. Like, why do they call it Black Friday? Is chicken sausage a real thing? And if so, what does the word sausage actually mean? What part of a cow do steak tips come from? All very good questions.

And to wrap up a good long weekend, I ventured to my favorite place today, or as  my Grandpa calls it, the Mecca. Home Depot. Back in my childhood days, we used to venture through the Candy Cane forest of Jones Tree Farm in the hood to pick out the perfect tree. Now, as a grown up, I venture all the way to Dorchester to pick out any tree in the $30 row from the garden center at Home Depot. My chainsaw skilled sassy tree wrapping machine operator friend Reggie even called me out on not checking the entire tree since my first one was half dead and brown on the back side, so I ended up with a much better tree. Thanks to Reggie. And this is how city girls tie the tree to the top of their car … we don’t. We put the backseat down and throw it in. Yolo.

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