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Molasses cookies! I’ve been craving molasses cookies! When I went through some boxes a few weeks ago, still trying to get unpacked and organized around here, I found a bunch of my old favorite recipes cards, but not the one with my molasses cookies. Bereft, I started searching out molasses cookie recipes, hoping to find something that looked familiar and yet not really remembering what the recipe was like. I finally turned to the church ladies, who never let me down, and came up with this one, which still didn’t feel quite right but was close. So I changed it around some till it felt like my recipe, you know the one I couldn’t really remember anyway, but I was going with my gut instincts here…..
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How to make Molasses Cookies:
1 1/2 cups butter, softened
1 3/4 cups sugar
2 eggs
3/4 cup molasses
4 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoons ginger
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
4 cups flour
Cream butter and sugar. (The church ladies’ recipe calls for shortening here–Crisco–but that just didn’t feel right to me. I knew in my hot, buttery heart that my recipe used butter, so I went with butter. Or I just love butter. But you can use shortening. You can even use margerine if you want. Three sticks of butter is a lot of butter. THAT’S WHY THESE COOKIES ARE SO GOOD.)
Stir in eggs and molasses.
Farm-fresh eggs are the best! (I love my chickens!)
Add soda, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, and salt. Stir to combine. (The church ladies advised 1 1/2 teaspoon cloves and no nutmeg at all, but that didn’t sound right to me. That sounded like a lot of cloves. Ground cloves are pretty strong and I tend to not like to include it too heavily in recipes, so I just knew it was an “off” element for the cookies I was craving. I reduced the cloves to 1/2 teaspoon and made up the other teaspoon with nutmeg.)
Oh my, just the scent of all these spices had me drooling.
Stir in flour.
Now here the church ladies think you should make a big ball of the dough and chill it for a couple hours then shape it into little balls to roll in sugar before baking. You know me better than that! I’m not going to do that. Instead, I spooned big clumps of it onto waxed paper and fiddled around with it to make it into logs for slicing.
I have this weird thing about touching cookie dough. It’s icky and I’d rather not touch it. Which is weird because I’ve always got my hands in bread dough, but I don’t have to make sense, do I? I finagle it around to where I don’t actually have to touch the dough and twist the ends.
Chill for an hour or two till it’s easy to slice.
Place slices on a greased cookie sheet. Sprinkle with sugar. My mother gave me this sugar shaker years ago and I love it. It’s fun to use for no good reason.
I like to sprinkle some of this natural cane sugar on cookies sometimes, too. It has more of a “syrupy” taste to it than regular granulated sugar. The flavor, in fact, is a lot like molasses, so it’s perfect for molasses cookies. (It’s great in coffee, too!)
Bake at 375-degrees for 8-10 minutes. Yum!!!!
People often ask what kind of cookies Clover eats, so since this is a cookie post, here it is:
The cookies I give Clover are animal cracker cookies. She loves them.
She also loves molasses.
And sometimes…..
Well sometimes….
Don’t be judging!
But sometimes….
I give her a real cookie, too.
See this recipe at Farm Bell Recipes and save it to your recipe box.
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