Monday, July 1, 2013

Soft & Chewy Ginger Cookies

One thing you discover very quickly when you live in the tropics is that wildlife is everywhere. By wildlife I mean mostly insects. Spiders, cockroaches and ants are regular visitors no matter how clean you keep your place, and geckos of varying sizes like to jump out of cupboards and corners and scare the crap out of you just about every day. The geckos are friendly and cute though, and they eat the mosquitoes, so they're ok. Other wildlife that (usually) stays outside are the rats, as well as a few birds and stray cats. Plus whatever it is that shears the top off my spinach seedlings EVERY TIME I plant some.

So the other day I had an invasion of ants and I had to take everything out of a couple of cupboards to figure out what they were after. Usually it's something sweet, and this time it was the leftover jelly candy from the Gingerbread Mega-Project back in December. I'm actually pretty lucky (and amazed!) that it took them this long to find it!

It's actually good when this happens, because it makes me clean out the cupboards, and when I do that I tend to find a few things I forgot I had. In this case, it was some candied ginger I bought while on the Taste of Hoi An Street Food Tour just after Christmas. My intention had been to make ginger cookies with it, but I guess somehow I forgot.


Because of the ants, and the candied nature of the ginger (they hadn't found it, but the removal of the leftover jelly candy meant they'd go for the next closest sweet thing) I put it in the fridge, and because my fridge is jam-packed full of stuff, I had to do something with some of it. Thus, Saturday became ginger cookie day!


I didn't want the traditional Ginger Snap, which would be crispy, but instead was thinking of a cookie that would be slightly crispy on the outside, but chewy in the middle. I found my ideal recipe on The Baker Chick, which sounded tasty and used molasses. (There was one elsewhere that didn't use molasses, but it just seems wrong to have a ginger cookie without molasses) And FYI, she also has a link to her recipe for homemade ginger syrup, candied ginger, and ginger ale. I might have to try making my own soon!

It's a pretty basic cookie recipe, but adds the chopped up candied ginger for an extra gingery bite.


Also, due to the lack of space in my fridge, I couldn't chill the dough, which meant it was too sticky to roll in my hands for that perfect round cookie shape. Instead I just dropped them from a teaspoon and sprinkled a bit of sugar on top.


They came out pretty yummy, although they weren't quite as crispy as I would've liked. They had a bit of crunch when they first came out of the oven though, which means it's probably just Hanoi's humidity that got to them and softened them up before I got them into an airtight container.

I also didn't find the candied ginger very prominent, so next time I might not chop it up quite as small, or maybe the slices were too thin. Or I might make my own candied ginger in bigger chunks.


As with most ginger cookies, they're delicious dunked in a giant mug of tea!





3 comments:

  1. yum! yeh, bigger chunks might be quite good...

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  2. They look delicious! I love me some ginger...

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  3. Thanks guys! Yeah, they were pretty yum!

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