I needed to restock the snack basket out front, but I felt indecisive, so I lined up eight recipes from blogs I like and rolled a D8. It landed on 1, a soft ginger sugar cookie from Cloudy Kitchen.
I’m nothing if not disobedient, so I didn’t actually follow the recipe much. My MO with Cloudy Kitchen is to cut down the flour by 20-30 grams to get the pillowy texture I like. Aside from that my translation of the recipe is more or less faithful to the ingredient ratios, if not the method.
Spices need to be bloomed with heat to activate their full potential, so I have them in the mixing bowl before anything else, and the first thing we do is hit them with hot brown butter. After you do that, give yourself a minute to take in the aroma. It’s a fall-winter meditation in its own right.
Ingredients
227 g salted Kerrygold
~ 2 tablespoons ground ginger
~ 2 teaspoons ground Ceylon cinnamon
~ ½ teaspoon ground green cardamom
~ ½ teaspoon ground smoked black cardamom (the key ingredient to my house pumpkin spice)
~ ½ teaspoon ground clove
300 g dark brown sugar
1 egg
~ ½ tablespoon cinnamon, vanilla, or lemon extract (I used cinnamon this time)
140 g spelt flour
120 g all-purpose flour
OR 260 g all-purpose flour total
½ teaspoon baking soda
For rolling:
~ 1 cup Demerara or other coarse-grained raw sugar
Method
Preheat the oven to 350˚F. Line a baking sheet with parchment.
In a small saucepan with high sides, melt the butter, and then turn up the heat to let it brown. Stir occasionally to speed up the process. Enjoy the classic high drama of this process for what it is.
While the butter browns, measure your spices into the mixing bowl. When the butter has finished browning, pour it directly over the spices while it’s still very hot. Stir and break up any clumps.
Weigh in the brown sugar and stir until everything is incorporated. Let this cool down for a few minutes. At this point I usually have an espresso because it takes about eight minutes to pull the shot and drink it.
When the sugar mixture has cooled somewhat, add the egg and the extract. Stir until well emulsified and smooth, with no liquidy bits floating on the surface.
If you’re an espresso hedon like me, you can pull a doubleshot at this point and stir it into the dough to make PSL cookies.
Weigh the spelt and flour into the bowl, and measure in the baking soda. Fold the dry ingredients into the dough until no streaks remain. Don’t overmix, but be thorough.
Add about a cup of Demerara or other coarse raw sugar to a shallow bowl. Ball up the cookie dough according to your personal preferences (I use a 1.5 tablespoon scoop scraped flat with a butter knife) and roll the balls in the sugar before arranging them on the pan.
These cookies are designed to be thick and soft sugar cookie type, not flat and chewy-crisp like a Gingersnap. If you feel hesitant about a smol, round shaped cookie, run a test batch first with only one or two. If you want your cookies to be more flat you can press the rest of them down onto the pan with a fork like traditional peanut butter cookies.
Bake for 8 mins (for small cookies like mine) or up to 12 minutes, until the center of the cookie is puffed through. If the center looks underdone, give it another minute.
I always scoot these the moment they come out of the oven. You don’t have to.
Store these cookies airtight – the sugar coating attracts moisture so you don’t want them in the open air.
