Ginger and Spice Cutout Cookies hold their shape while baking and are a dream to decorate. The finished cookies are pretty whether decorated with careful attention or with a few quick drizzles of vanilla icing and colorful sugar sprinkles.
Finding the Best Cookie Recipes
It’s time to start my Christmas baking. I talked to my son about that over the weekend. He had been baking Snickerdoodles. Next up was Peanut Butter Blossoms. He sees little point in looking through food blogs for new cookie recipes. “After all,” he reasons, “every worthwhile variation of a cookie must have been perfected before the internet came into existence.”
I can’t really disagree. While I enjoy posting my favorite recipes for holiday sweets at My Own Sweet Thyme most of them are from the pre-internet era. A few come from my years helping in Aunt Hen’s kitchen. Some come from friends or from cookie swaps I’ve hosted over the years. Other favorites are from old cookbooks I’ve collected. Still more were clipped out of newspapers and lifestyle magazines back in the day.
These Ginger and Spice Cutout Cookies are a good example. This recipe has been a family favorite for decades. I first discovered it as a newlywed working out Christmas traditions in my new home. I clipped the recipe from a magazine I picked up at the supermarket and gave it a trial run one weekend that December.
Molasses and Spice Cutout Cookies
The cookies were delicious. I loved the assertiveness of the spices and the depth of flavor added by the cocoa and molasses. The dough was easy to put together and, after chilling overnight, it was easy to work with too.
These spice cookies also bake well. The cookie cutouts hold their shape in the oven while the ginger, cinnamon and cloves fill the kitchen with a festive fragrance. Once cool they are a dream to decorate, offering a dark background for the simple vanilla icing. The finished cookies are pretty whether decorated with careful attention or with a few quick drizzles of icing and sugar sprinkles. These cookies even keep well, as long as you let the icing dry completely before tucking them away between sheets of parchment or waxed paper. You can also freeze the cookies before you add the icing in case you want to do the decorating later.
Pleased with the outcome, I brought a plate of decorated Ginger and Spice Cutout Cookies to lunch with a friend I had recently met. Soon I discovered that she had made Spice Cookies too. I knew this recipe was going to be a keeper when I learned that she had chosen exactly the same recipe to make her Christmas cutout cookies.
Recipe Organization
Many years have passed since Alanna and I shared our cookies over lunch that day. Nearly four decades later, we are both still making gingery molasses cutout cookies for our holiday celebrations. And we are both still using the recipe we found in that lifestyle magazine so long ago.
My only problem with the recipe is an organizational one. Despite making these cookies almost every year since I first discovered them, I am never able to find the recipe quickly when I am ready to start baking. After years of food blogging it is hard to say why It isn’t already posted at My Own Sweet Thyme. It is also odd that my laptop’s finder box assures me I’ve never added it to my computer files.
Luckily I have a reliable backup. It is my old cut and paste recipe book. This book consists of recipes cut from magazines and newspapers and then taped to lined notebook paper and secured in a three-ring binder. It also includes a number of handwritten recipes from Aunt Hen, Aunt Bet, my sisters-in-law, and friends. The tape has yellowed and loosened. Quite a few pages have torn out and been reinserted in page protectors.
Needless to say, these recipe books are not pretty. Still, they occupy a shelf in my office. I don’t pull them out as often as I used to but they remain a valuable resource. In the smaller binder I found the original yellowed magazine clipping for a recipe titled Frosty Christmas Tree Cookies. It includes a photo and several other recipes from the same article. If I had to guess I’d say it was clipped from Family Circle Magazine in the early 1980s.
Sharing Our Treasure
With recipe in hand I can now begin my holiday baking. This year I am not only baking a batch of these delicious cookies, I am also filing the recipe on my computer and posting it here at My Own Sweet Thyme for safekeeping.
Alanna has also posted this recipe to her website, KitchenParade.com. Looking at her post for Frosty Christmas Trees alongside my old recipe clipping, it is interesting to note that neither of us has changed or added much to the original recipe over the years. In the end it seems my son may have been right. In this case, at least, the recipe for my Ginger and Spice Cutout Cookies does seem to have been perfected before the internet came into existence. Still, for the sake of finding the recipe with ease and making it available to share with friends, I am thankful for this little space online where I can stash the recipes I have come to treasure over the years.
Happy Baking!
Ginger and Spice Cutout Cookies
Course: CookiesCuisine: AmericanDifficulty: Easy72
cookies45
minutes1
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minutesThese fragrant spice cookies hold their shape while baking and are easy to decorate with a drizzle of vanilla icing.
Ingredients
3 3/4 cups flour (17 ozs or 480g)
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 Tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
2 teaspoons ground ginger
3 teaspoons ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons ground cloves
1 cup (2 sticks or 8 ozs) butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1/2 cup molasses
Sugar Icing (recipe follows)
- Vanilla Icing
1 pound powdered sugar (3.5 cups or 450g)
1 teaspoon vanilla
4 Tablespoons + 2 teaspoons water
Directions
- In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, salt, cocoa, ginger, cinnamon and cloves.
- In the large bowl of an electric mixer beat together the butter, sugar, egg and molasses until light and fluffy. Stir in the flour mixture until well blended. Divide the dough in thirds, gently press each into a thick disc, wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for several hours or overnight.
- When the dough is chilled remove discs of cookie dough, one at a time, and place on a floured work surface. Roll dough to a 1/4-inch thickness. Flour cookie cutters and cut dough into shapes. Place the shapes one inch apart on cookie sheets lined with parchment paper.
- Bake cookies in a preheated oven at 350F about 8 to 10 minutes for soft cookies, or 10-12 minutes for crisper cookies. Cool cookies on cookie sheets for 2 minutes then, using a wide spatula, remove cookies to a wire rack to cool completely.
- Once cookies cool, mix Vanilla Icing by combining the powdered sugar, vanilla and water in a medium bowl and stirring until smooth. Adjust the consistency, adding water a teaspoon at a time, if needed, until the icing flows easily from a spoon.
- Spoon Vanilla Icing into a sandwich-size Ziploc storage bag. (To make the transfer easy, line a small coffee mug or teacup with the storage bag, turning the top edge down over the rim of the cup. Transfer the vanilla icing to the open sandwich bag before zipping it shut and pushing the icing gently toward a lower corner of the bag.)
Snip off no more than 1/4-inch of one lower corner of the bag. Using the Ziploc bag as a piping bag, drizzle the icing in a zigzag pattern over the cookie or outline the cookie and fill in the middle. Quickly sprinkle with decorative sugar, if desired.
Notes
- Recipe Source: A clipping (probably from Family Circle Magazine) from the early 1980s. The magazine’s recipe was called Frosty Christmas Tree Cookies.
Lisa,
Thank you for adding this recipe to your blog! I love the decorations. You have achieved a “black belt” level in artistic balance between cookie and frosting. Very nice!