Every Christmas cookie platter NEEDS something ginger. These cookies are soft, like a sugar cookie, with a little brown butter icing. Yum. Kind of like a thin slice of a gingerbread with glaze.
Sweet Ginger Brown! Grant loves to say that. Don't ask me why.
Ginger Cream Cookies with Brown Butter Icing
adapted from Melinda's Grandma Butters recipe
Cookies:
2 cubes or 1 cup butter
1 cup molasses
1 cup white sugar
1 rounded teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon salt
2 beaten eggs
1 tablespoon baking soda, dissolved in 1/4 cup water
6 cups flour, approximately (I use about 7 cups total)
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Bring butter, molasses, sugar, spices and salt to boil. Cool.
Pour into large bowl.
Add two beaten eggs.
Add the soda/ water mixture to the batter. The batter will foam up a bit.
Add the flour 1 cup at a time. After mixing in flour, add more if needed to produce dough that is not too sticky to roll out. Roll out a portion of the dough with floured rolling pin to about 1/4 inch thickness.
Using a cookie or biscuit cutter 2 1/4 inch in diameter, cut the cookies and place on ungreased cookie sheet.
Bake for about 8 minutes at 375 degrees. Ice while cookies are warm.
Brown Butter Icing:
(see tip #4 below)
1 cube or 1/2 cup butter
1/3 cup cream, half and half or milk (if you want the icing to be thin, use milk)
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 lb powdered sugar
dash salt
Brown butter over medium heat in saucepan. Remove from heat as soon as butter turns golden. Add rest of ingredients. Ice cookies while still warm.
yield about 4 dozen cookies.
Tips:
After making a few batches, I learned the following:
1. Simple cookies.
2. Don't need to be refrigerated, but you may refrigerate after assembling the dough.
3. Clear counter space, you'll need it to leave the cookies out till the icing is set up.
4. Browned Butter : Click here for a little tutorial. It took me 3 batches to get this semi-right.
Key: patience. Don't turn the heat up too high. Melinda's icing turns out more brown than mine. Not sure why? I found that if I continued to brown the butter, it burnt. So, mine has little flecks of brown in it, instead of being brown all the way through.
Note to me: This is not difficult, unless you are me, and you make it difficult.
5. Once you start baking, you need to make the icing, so it will be ready when the cookies come out of the oven.
6. These cookies freeze well (yes, before and after frosted).
7. My modifications: Melinda's recipe calls for 3 eggs. I like my cookies a little more on the dense side, so I reduced it to 2 eggs. Also, added some ground cloves for a little extra bit of flavor, and increased the baking temp to 375 for 8 minutes instead of 350, to give the cookies a little more crust on the outside but still soft inside.
