sugar and spice cookies

I've noticed that whenever I follow cookie recipes, I end up with far fewer cookies than the recipe predicts. It never fails. Sure, you could blame the fact that I'm a spoon-licking dough-eater when I bake... but I didn't eat 35 cookies worth of dough. Yeah, you read that right. This recipe was supposed to make 55 cookies, but it made 20.

Like I said, it's not exclusive to this recipe. It's every recipe. Am I living on another planet? Could I have eaten 35 cookies raw? The logical explanation is that I just made my cookies too big. In fact, a quick glance at this particular recipe indicates that I did and I'm probably a repeat offender in this respect.

I'm glad the cookies were so big - they were chewy and had a cakey quality that wouldn't be there if they were smaller. They didn't flatten as much as I expected, but that contributed to the soft texture I loved so much. The spice combination was good too. They packed a little bit of a punch with the addition of black pepper, which was absent in the other more blah ginger cookie recipe I made last month from the Alice's Tea Cup cookbook. There was definitely a little bit of heat left behind with the last bite! The recipe below was adapted from one given to me by an exceptional cook named Maryse and it outdid the ginger snaps from a certain famous tea and bakeshop in New York City. By far.

sugar and spice cookies

3/4 cup salted butter
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1/4 cup molasses
2 1/4 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon allspice
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
Granulated sugar for rolling

• Preheat oven to 375ºF and line a baking tray with parchment paper.
• In a medium bowl, cream together the butter and brown sugar. Add the egg and molasses; beat well to combine.
• In a medium bowl, combine flour, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice and black pepper.
• Add flour mixture to butter mixture and stir to combine. Work dough with your hands to pick up all the floury bits.
• Form dough into balls approximately 2" in diameter. Roll them in sugar and place them on your baking tray with at least 2" between each cookie. Bake for approximately 8-10 minutes, or until the bottoms have browned and the cookies have sunk down and cracked on the top.