Hot Cookie - the Archive

My friend Gitte brought along a batch of Chocolate Ginger Shortbread. These refrigerator cookies needed several hours of chilling, so she made them up the night before. It is a handy thing to do when you know you are expecting company and want to have some fresh cookies to serve. They roll into a tube shape and you can cut as many as you need from the roll, saving the rest for another time. Gitte's Chocolate Ginger Shortbread Never mind the cookies. Gitte gave me the best kitchen tip of the day. She reuses butter wrappers whenever she can. When the piece of parchment I cut did not cover the entire baking sheet, she reached for the butter wrappers to fill in the empty spaces. Why didn't I think of that? She was reluctant to have me spill this tip in my blog. "Maybe you'll find it's toxic or something!" It turns out that lots of people keep their butter wrappers and reuse them to butter a pan. And for many other purposes. See the comment...

Steve Hartman's remembrance of Andy Rooney this week would have been unmemorable, at least for me, except for Rooney's comment about -- ginger snaps: I like ginger snaps with milk.  But it's always hard to come out even. You either need one more ginger snap or another swallow of milk. It's just as hard to imagine the mountains Andy Rooney would make of such molehills. Why were his many essays at the end of each 60 Minutes episode so appealing? Perhaps he'd find the crucial pet peeve for some segment of the audience. Maybe his musings endeared us to him in the same way Uncle Les's "quirky" outbursts did at holiday gatherings. Maybe it was the way Rooney could make a story out of nearly nothing. Rooney was easily irked. And easily amused. And he found just a different enough perspective about things we so easily take for granted that we were forced to think about them all over again. Now, where did I put those ginger snaps? I like 'em with o...

I keep seasonings on two lazy Susans next to the measuring cups. Among them are all the spices in these cookies--cinnamon, ginger and cloves. The label "Fall Spices" graces that particular shelf. Sparkling sugar topping on left, granulated on right. I usually think about this type of cookie later in the year when I'm breaking out the wool sweaters and the leaves start to fall. When I made these--just a couple of weeks ago--summer hadn't started. These cookies were welcome. Everyone has a favorite ginger cookie and these are some of the best of their type. I love everything in them. Beyond the spices, the other flavors blend without overpowering each other. Who can go wrong with a little brown sugar and molasses? The instructions say to bake them for 7-8 minutes, a little less for a chewy cookie, my personal favorite. If you want a crisp cookie, add 2 minutes to the cooking time. Easy. The recipe calls for dipping the tops in sugar just before baking. I wo...