It is Virtual Christmas Cookie Exchange Time!
Welcome to my home for Christmas!
This is my favorite blog hop of the year.
For this year, I wanted to make a gingerbread cookie with candied ginger.
I started with this "flight" of cookies for sampling to decide on the "best" recipe.
In the end, I made them three ways for everyone to choose.
My Ginger Snowball Cookies ~ Three Ways
are for the ...
Please visit all my friends today:
December 7
Life in the Scrapatch (you are here)
My Ginger Snowballs are based on this recipe:
Gingerbread Snowballs @ Crazy For Crust
I made this as shown and then added the other goodies.
I gathered my ingredients:
- 1 cup butter
- ½ cup powdered sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1 teaspoon ground ginger
- ½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
- ¼ teaspoon ground allspice
- ¼ teaspoon ground cloves
- 1 tablespoon molasses
- 2 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
- I preheated my oven to 325° and lined two cookie sheets with parchment paper.
- I mixed butter in my kitchen mixer until fluffy. Added the powdered sugar, vanilla, salt, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice, cloves, and molasses and mixed until smooth. Added flour and mixed until a smooth dough formed. The last part was done by hand.
- For basic recipe, I scooped 1 tablespoon of dough, rolled into ball and in powdered sugar and placed on prepared cookie sheet.
- I baked my cookies for 15 minutes until bottoms were just slightly brown. After removing from the oven I let them set 5 minutes and then re-rolled them in powdered sugar.
- For my test flight of cookies, made one plain rolled in powdered sugar, one plain thumbprint rolled in demerara sugar cookie with blackberry jam,
- two with just finely chopped candied ginger rolled in powdered sugar,
- two with finely ground walnuts added to the candied ginger
- and rolled in nuts,
- and three with finely chopped golden raisins added to the nuts and ginger, two rolled in powdered sugar and one in demerara sugar.
- Then Mr. Scrapatch and I tested while we decorated our tree.
In the end, we did not decide on a favorite.
Mr Scrapatch enjoyed the ones with just nuts and ginger
and liked the fact that the spices were not too strong.
These cookie were not very "spicy" on the ginger/clove scale.
If you like your gingerbread cookies to have a bit of bite,
you may want to double the spices.
I found the ones with chopped candied ginger, nuts and golden raisins
had a nice moist and flavorful chew.
So I made all three kinds.
To the basic dough, I added one cup of finely chopped candied ginger and scooped, rolled in demerara sugar and baked this batch of cookies.
Then I added 3/4 cup of finely ground walnuts and made another batch rolled in the extra ground nuts.
Then I added 1/2 cup of finely chopped golden raisins and rolled this batch in powdered sugar.
The recipe would make about one dozen of each kind of cookies this way.
I had hoped to have my Gingerbread Cookie Cross Stitch
completed for this post, but I have very busy doing other things.
I sat today and enjoyed my tree and latte and cookie break
while Maestro enjoyed The Tree.
Thank you for visiting us today.
I hope you have enjoyed my virtual cookies this year.
May your Christmas be merry and bright and full with delicious cookies this year!
