I’m a sucker for ginger cookies. My general motto when it comes to desserts is “if there’s no chocolate, it’s not worth it.” Good ginger cookies are one of the exceptions. They need to be chewy, spicy, and just sweet enough. These cookies are the result of several years of tweaks and refinements, and they are everything a cookie should be and more.

This year I made one more tweak, and I think it’s the last one. I also happen to think it was a bit of a stroke of genius (if I do say so myself). Before adding the spices to the rest of the dry ingredients, I toasted them in a dry skillet until I was sneezing quite enthusiastically and my entire kitchen smelled of ginger and cloves.

Toast away!

Rolling the dough in ginger sugar before baking adds lots of great flavour!

This quick, simple trick really brought the spices to life and added a depth of flavour to the cookies that everyone appreciated. I don’t think the batch lasted 48 hours.

Perfect Chewy Ginger Cookies

1 ¾ cup all-purpose flour
½ cup whole wheat flour
2 ½ tsp ground ginger
½ tsp ground cloves
¾ tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp baking soda (USA / Canada)
¼ tsp table salt
¾ cup butter, softened
½ cup white sugar
½ cup brown sugar
1 egg, at room temperature
1 tbsp orange juice
1 tsp vanilla extract
¼ cup fancy molasses
¼ cup crystallized ginger, minced
3 tbsp white sugar, for rolling
1 tsp ground sugar, for rolling

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Mix together all the dry ingredients, toasting the spices in a dry skillet until fragrant before adding.

Cream the butter and sugars together. Add the egg, orange juice, and vanilla. To easily measure out the molasses, grease your measuring cup first, and warm up the molasses in the microwave for 20 or so seconds. Add the molasses and the crystallized ginger to the batter. Cover and chill for at least 20 minutes.

Mix together the 3 tbsp of white sugar and 1 tsp ground ginger. Roll walnut-sized balls of dough, and roll these balls in the ginger sugar. Bake in pre-heated oven 3″ apart, one sheet at a time, for 8 minutes, rotating the sheet half way through. I’ve found that having more than one sheet in the oven at a time results in one sheet being really flat and pale, so it’s best to just do one at a time.

Cool (a little, at least) and devour!