Sparkles Ginger Cookies Made on Location – Arnprior, ON

This ginger cookies recipe is one of my mother’s and it is awesome!  These cookies stay moist and soft for weeks and they have a nice ginger-y bite to them.

The original recipe sent to me called for white sugar, margarine, and a dash of cloves.  I substituted brown sugar, butter, and deleted the cloves.

Click here for the recipe or scroll to the bottom of the post.

Substituting brown sugar for white sugar worked quite well except for the lumps that I had to work against.  I’m starting to realize that at times, the order which I add ingredients is quite important.  In this case, I think that perhaps I should have blended the brown sugar with a wet ingredient first to smooth it out?  Any thoughts on that?

Aside from that, everything mixed quite well.  I used a wooden spoon and my hands to mix…quite the sticky mess, I must say, until all the flour was mixed in. And regardless how sticky it was…it smelled absolutely heavenly!

Next step, roll the dough into balls and cover each of those in sugar.  I started sprinkling sugar on them, did that for a whole cookie sheet’s worth until I realized that actually ‘rolling’ them in the sugar was so much easier.

Once sugared to my satisfaction,  I simply popped them into the oven and about 12 minutes later…voila!  Yummy cookies!

Rolling them in sugar isn’t technically necessary but that is what gives them their name.  The sugar melts slightly and is nice and sparkly when they come out of the oven.  (At this point, I’m just waiting for a comment about sparkly cookies for sparkly vampires…And yes, I’m looking at you!)

So, my finished product, as seen below, was celebrated with a glass of wine!  I’ve been told that all successful recipes should be celebrated with a glass of grapes and I’m pretty much behind that 100 percent!  (As a sidenote, I was also told that *technically* you should celebrate each STEP of a recipe with a glass of wine…but to those people I say, “You eat out a lot, don’t you?”)

To conclude the wine topic, Shiraz wasn’t necessarily the best choice to pair with ginger cookies…perhaps a cabernet, or something with a bit more tang.

Overall though, these cookies were as I remember them growing up: soft, sparkly and damn good!

RECIPE

 

• 3/4 cup butter
• 1 cup brown sugar (the recipe called for white sugar originally)
• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup molasses
• 2 3/4 cups flour
• 2 tsp Baking Soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp ginger
• 1/2 tsp cloves (I left these out as per the tastebuds of those who would be eating them)

Preheat oven to 350.

Roll the mixture into balls and roll those lightly in white sugar.

Bake on cookie sheet bake for 10 mins for soft cookies or 12 mins for crunchier ones.

Let cool then move to cooling rack.