I might have overdone it on the ginger and spice desserts at our holiday party, but I couldn't help myself -- I love ginger in baked goods. And I had recently added a great-looking ginger cookie to my to-bake list: the "Double-Ginger Crumb Cookies" from Dorie's Cookies. These cookies use the same "Do-Almost-Anything Vanilla Cookie Dough" that I've previously made for Dorie's "Vanilla Polka Dots."
The way you turn the vanilla cookie dough into ginger cookie dough is by incorporating a ginger syrup, made by combining minced ginger and sugar and letting them stand for 5-10 minutes until syrup forms. A variation on this ginger syrup is also an ingredient in Dorie's Princeton Gingersnaps, and the previous time I attempted it, I never actually got any syrup. This time I used a ceramic ginger grater instead of a Microplane to grate the fresh ginger, and I successfully got syrup. You mix the ginger syrup mixture into a freshly made batch of the base vanilla dough (a mixture of room temperature butter, sugar, salt, egg whites, vanilla, and flour), roll it out between sheets of parchment, and chill.
Once the rolled dough was firm, I used a 2-inch round cutter to form the cookies. The ginger cookie recipe is written to use a quarter of a recipe of the base vanilla dough, but I just used an entire recipe of the vanilla dough and made a quadruple batch, ending up with 65 cookies (I did re-roll the scraps a couple of times). Before baking, you sprinkle on a chilled mixture of ginger crumbs -- cold butter cut into flour, sugar, ground ginger, and salt. The crumbs were quite dry, so they scattered everywhere and it was difficult to keep them just on top of the cookies.
I really liked these cookies, although I don't know that the feeling was shared among our party guests, because there were quite a few leftover at the end of the evening. The cookies definitely had ginger flavor, but they were not very spicy -- in fact, if anything, they seemed more like butter cookies accented with ginger. The cookies were firm and crisp, and the crumb mixture made them distinctive and a bit more indulgent. I would happily enjoy them year round.
Recipe: "Double-Ginger Crumb Cookies" (and "Do-Almost-Anything Vanilla Cookie Dough") from Dorie's Cookies by Dorie Greenspan, recipes both available here from The Washington Post.
Previous Post: "Pearls Make a Gem of a Cookie: Vanilla Polka Dots," November 19, 2016.
The way you turn the vanilla cookie dough into ginger cookie dough is by incorporating a ginger syrup, made by combining minced ginger and sugar and letting them stand for 5-10 minutes until syrup forms. A variation on this ginger syrup is also an ingredient in Dorie's Princeton Gingersnaps, and the previous time I attempted it, I never actually got any syrup. This time I used a ceramic ginger grater instead of a Microplane to grate the fresh ginger, and I successfully got syrup. You mix the ginger syrup mixture into a freshly made batch of the base vanilla dough (a mixture of room temperature butter, sugar, salt, egg whites, vanilla, and flour), roll it out between sheets of parchment, and chill.
Once the rolled dough was firm, I used a 2-inch round cutter to form the cookies. The ginger cookie recipe is written to use a quarter of a recipe of the base vanilla dough, but I just used an entire recipe of the vanilla dough and made a quadruple batch, ending up with 65 cookies (I did re-roll the scraps a couple of times). Before baking, you sprinkle on a chilled mixture of ginger crumbs -- cold butter cut into flour, sugar, ground ginger, and salt. The crumbs were quite dry, so they scattered everywhere and it was difficult to keep them just on top of the cookies.
Recipe: "Double-Ginger Crumb Cookies" (and "Do-Almost-Anything Vanilla Cookie Dough") from Dorie's Cookies by Dorie Greenspan, recipes both available here from The Washington Post.
Previous Post: "Pearls Make a Gem of a Cookie: Vanilla Polka Dots," November 19, 2016.
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