Friday, January 28, 2011

Recipe Friday's

                                 GINGER COOKIES

Stella: Sugar & Spice and everything nice is exactly what makes up these chewy little snacks. Plus, there are only 3 grams of fat per cookie (only 61 calories!) These were a big hit at our house. Even after The Computer Man told me he did not like Gingersnap cookies, he ate 4 of them! But beware, this made a TON of cookies and I would recommend cutting the recipe in half if there are only 2 of you in your house. And now maybe Loki can finally get her cookie badge and impress Big T by just following my simple directions!

Okay here we go. Preheat over to 350 degrees. First you will need:  1 and 1/2 cups Crisco.... That's actually a ton of shortening, which why I would half that if you don't want 120 cookies.


                           Now in a large mixing bowl beat shortening for 30 seconds like so.



Add 2 cups of sugar. Wee!!!! In it goes!



Be sure to scrape the sides of the bowl occasionally as I am demonstrating here in this lovely photo.


Beat in 2 eggs and 1/2 cup molasses, which for some reason we already had in our cupboard to use.


Watch here as I show you how to pour into a bowl... Marvelous work Stella.


Starting to mix it all up


The end result will look like this.


Now in a separate bowl you will add 4 tsp ginger, 2 tsp baking soda, 1 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon, 1 tsp cloves. Make sure you have all of this on hand before you bake the cookies, as I had to run up to my Grandma's twice to borrow things we were out of.


You will mix all the spices up with 4 1/2 cups flour. Yowza. That's a lot. But check out my hand stirring up the spices into the flour. Do you think I could be a hand model... like George?


Add the flour into the mix. It will be a pretty crumby texture.



Now shape the dough into 1-inch balls. Roll balls in a bowl of sugar (sorry, not pictured here. Try to figure it out yourselves though.) Hint: It should look like this!


Place the balls onto a cookie sheet lined with foil, spaced evenly apart.


Whoops, thought you might like to see an extra picture of the balls.


It's the big moment you've been waiting for. Time to put them in the oven for 8-9 minutes. I did a full 9 minutes, although you want to make sure NOT to overbake.


The tops should be puffed and the bottoms should be light brown.


Place on a wire rack to cool. And note that the insides will appear gooey like they are not done yet. But once you let them set, they will harden up and be perfectly chewy. I was afraid I didn't bake long enough, but didn't want to overbake. Once they had cooled on the wire rack, they were perfect.


And here is our finished product. You guys have worked so hard. You deserve to eat a few.


And as you can see here, I was not lying about the nutritional value.



Thanks for joining me! Be sure to let me know what other recipes you would like to read about!

5 comments:

  1. Loki: 1. I dont have a mixer...I asked Stella about this and she said that the cookies could still be made however I would get a good arm workout.
    2. Ginger makes me remember the early days of pregnancy when I was trying everything to make my nauseousness go away. I ate Ginger Snaps.... well I puked ginger snaps. In other words it did not work.

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  2. sounds so yummy!!! I will try them. Also today on Dr. Oz this dude mad a recipe for brownies that are 88 calories and less than a gram of fat. The brownie bites you get at the store are 180 calories EACH!!! So, I want to get the recipe off of his site. Here is the kicker.....don't puke! He had the audience sample these and they all agreed you cannot taste the main ingredient. I, for one, LOVE this main ingredient! However, I've never dreamed of using it in desserts. OK...here it is...black beans!!! EEEwwwwww! Sounds nasty. Still, I'm going to try 'em!!

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  3. Hey Stella, How about the recipe for your amazing rolls that you made us when little Meatball was born. They were unbelievable!!!! They were so good we had to hide them from Beard boy or he would have eaten the all.

    Oh, and I did have these deeeeelicious cookies as well. They were so good that I ate one on a week day. We all know choc chip doesn't eat sweets on the week days. So shame on me.... I ate one. YUMMY DUMMY!!!! Make me more, its the week end!!

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  4. Thank you Stella for bringing me the ginger cookies. I ate two right away. I love ginger cookies..ginger snaps especially. I'm weird and like cookies crisp and kinda over baked, as all my girls and Stella will tell you. My fav is gingerbread men cookies. Sigh. But I never made them this Christmas. It also takes hard work, and ginger and molasses but the fun part is making any shaped 'men' you want. You don't use a cookie cutter. Very good of course and worthy of going off your rules, Choc Chip. The pics were great. I just can't figure out how you can make cookies and still be dieting and working out. I usually can't do both. Nice post Stella!

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  5. Well, I ate 2 cookies the night I made them and then we gave most of them away! Leaving me with no temptation!!! :) Plus it was a nice reward and we still need to eat some fat every now and then, right? I will do the rolls recipe next just for Choc Chip & Poppy !

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