Sugar-Topped Molasses Spice Cookies

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe was selected by Pamela of Cookies with Boys. She picked the Sugar-Topped Molasses Spice Cookies. This month the Tuesdays with Dorie bloggers were given the option to do the weekly recipes in any order, but I’ve decided to be a complete conformist and follow the regular weekly schedule. If you’d like this week’s recipe, and you really should get this recipe, visit Pamela’s blog for the complete recipe.

I love cookies with molasses and ginger, so I figured these would be great and they certainly were. My favorite cookies are my triple ginger cookies, so all cookies must be compared to those. While these aren’t as good as my favorites, they are pretty close and have some excellent qualities. These cookies have ground ginger and molasses, and I think you could add chopped candied ginger if you wanted a nice ginger boost. They do come together quickly, so that’s a bonus. The dough chills for at least an hour, I chilled mine for longer than that and the dough was still a little sticky, so make sure you leave plenty of time for the dough to chill.

The texture of these cookies is fabulous. They are thin and chewy. I was a little surprised that they were so chewy since they used butter, which typically yields a crisp cookie. I guess the amount of brown sugar and the molasses offsets the butter. I rolled mine in coarse sanding sugar, which adds a good crunch to the cookies and gives them a little bit of sparkle. I made mine a little smaller than the recipe specified (I never did get a final count since my husband ate some off of the cooling rack while I was still baking them up), so I did have to adjust the baking time. They can get too browned very quickly, so watch the last few minutes that they are baking. So while this isn’t as fabulous as the triple ginger cookie, it’s an excellent choice for this season.

Recipe from Baking from My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, pages 76 and 77