6. Brown Sugar-Ginger Crisps (p. 665)

A few weeks ago, I made these Lemon-Glazed Candied-Ginger Cookies from the June issue of Martha Stewart Living. Since then, I've been looking for something to do with the rest of the huge tub of candied ginger that I bought to make Martha's cookies.

I scoured The Book's index for recipes that called for candied ginger, and I came across these cookies. This recipe is pretty similar to Martha's in terms of ingredients and flavor, but in terms of labor, The Book's recipe is much easier. Martha, being Martha, calls for chilling the cookie dough, rolling it out to a 1/4 inch thickness, and cutting it into perfect little rounds. The Book simply asks you to drop teaspoons of dough (more about that later) onto a cookie sheet. The lemon icing drizzled on top of Martha's cookies, however, is a nice touch that makes her the winner of this battle in the cookie wars, though. Sorry, Gourmet.

Don't get me wrong, these cookies are very tasty. They're crisp and buttery. The sweet, spicy, and chewy bits of candied ginger add interest to the cookies, but, there wasn't enough ginger flavor - even after following Kevin's advice and adding a teaspoon of ginger in place of the 1/4 teaspoon called for in the recipe.

Now, let me rant for a moment about cookie recipes in general. Ever since I made my first batch of Nestle's Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies as a child, I have never been able to produce the number of cookies promised by any cookie recipe. This recipe was no exception, but I don't think that it's my fault. The Book says that this recipe yields "about 7 dozen cookies." For those of you who, like me, never memorized your multiplication tables, that's 84 cookies. How's that possible? It's because The Book instructs you to drop teaspoons of the dough onto the cookie sheet. After my first batch, I thought, this has to be a mistake. I never realized just how small a teaspoon is. So, after the first batch of mini-cookies (see the top cookie in the photo to the left), I tossed the teaspoon aside, and I plopped heaping dessert spoons of dough on the cookie sheets. To paraphrase Crocodile Dundee, "That's not a cookie, THAT'S a cookie." Needless to say, my yield was nowhere near seven dozen, but that's OK by me.

Date Cooked: June 19, 2008
Degree of Difficulty: Medium
Rating: B