Sunday Supper: Ultimate Ginger Cookie

I'm sharing my ULTIMATE ginger cookie recipe with you today. I promise that you will bake these up, everyone will love them, and you will making batch 2 within a week.

Ginger Cookies
by Cayenne (my notes say food network but i don't remember exactly)

1 ½ cups unsalted butter (or use salted butter and leave out salt below)
2 cups light brown sugar
½ cup unsulfered molasses
2 eggs
3 ½ cups whole wheat pastry flour
1 cup unbleached all purpose flour (or just add all whole wheat)
4 teaspoons ground ginger
4 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons fresh ginger, grated
1 cup candied ginger, finely chopped
~2 cups Turbinado sugar (can be found at trader joe's, brown in color and has large crystals)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees
Cream butter and brown sugar until fluffy; Add molasses and eggs and mix well. Combine flour, ground ginger, baking soda and salt and add to butter mixture; Blend in fresh and candied ginger.Pour turbinado sugar on a plate; roll tsp-size dough into ball, roll in sugar; press flat the dough balls on parchment covered baking sheet (or press down in cross-hatch pattern w/ fork). TEB figured out a quick way to coat multiple dough-balls at a time.

These cookies are going to flatten out a lot. Bake about 10 minutes for soft chewy cookies; ~12 minutes for crunchy cookies.

N.B. a kitchenaid mixer really helps mix up the stiff dough or coerce some muscle in the house to stir - that is what I did.

photo credit: Cayenne 12.16.09