Ginger Cookies

I remember when I first had these, Molly gave them to us one year when I was about 11 on a plate full of Christmas cookies. She made hers bigger than I make mine and they were harder but I loved the flavor, so I asked for the recipe. I make Ginger cookies most often when we are traveling and they need to be good at a later date. They travel, freeze and store great. Keeping their chewiness and flavor for quite awhile.

Ginger Cookies


1 1/4 cup oil
2 cups granulated sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup molasses, any strength is fine

Cream these together until they are well mixed and fluffy.

4 cups flour ( I use mostly whole wheat)
1 teaspoon salt
4 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoon cinnamon
2 teaspoon ginger
1 teaspoon cloves

Add 2 cups of the flour and all the spices to the previous ingredients, mix them well and then add the next 2 cups of flour. Mix dough until all ingredients have been well incorporated.

Refrigerate dough for 1 hour, a little more or less is just fine. (If you don't refrigerate the dough you will have a flatter cookie (like those in the picture above))

Heat oven to 350 degrees.

Roll teaspoons full of dough into balls. Then roll them in granulated sugar before placing balls two inches apart on cookie sheet.
Bake for 5-7 minutes or until browned and beginning to set. I like to over bake them just a little. Doughy ginger cookies just don't seem as good as doughy chocolate chip cookies. Almost burnt ginger cookies can be quite tasty, so if you are going to go one way or the other I recommend over done.
Enjoy warm cookies with a fresh cup of coffee or a cold glass of milk.
~Anna

Chocolate Chip Cookies

I was kind of the main baker growing up and I did a lot of baking to keep up with our family's ravenous appetites, especially Peter's. He often needed a sweet treat when he returned from an afternoon spent cross country skiing. In northern Minnesota you can burn a lot of calories doing that. Items with chocolate were his favorites, all of ours really. So this recipe was adjusted years ago to fit our family of eight and I have continued to adjust it as my baking style changes, like adding whole wheat to it for the last ten years. So here you go, my
Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe.

2 cups butter
1 1/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup dry milk
2 cups brown sugar ( I often fill a 2 c. measuring cup 1/3 full with minced dates and then put the brown sugar over top of this to add a little more nutrients to the cookies)
4 teaspoons vanilla
4 eggs

Place this all in a large mixing bowl and then beat together until thoroughly creamed and mixture is fluffy. Then add:

1 cup oatmeal
2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons baking soda
3 cups whole wheat flour

Mix this well and add:

2 cups white flour
12 ounces of chocolate chips

Mix this well.
Drop onto greased cookie sheets, spacing about 2 inches apart and bake at 375* for 7-10 minutes, until they are nicely browned and set.

When they have cooled a little, remove from cookie sheet.
♪This recipe makes a lot, I am not really into counting cookies but I think it might make about 8 dozen. Enough to last a few days or more around here.
♫ I sometimes make the dough the night before and bake these for breakfast. I figure with a glass of milk and some fruit on the side they are a fairly balanced diet. When I do that I also sometimes use oil for 1 cup of the butter. It is cheaper and depending on what health food group you are listening to it might be better for you. Once I have it mixed up I cover the bowl and store it in the fridge until I am ready to put them onto their cookie sheets for baking.
Happy Baking!
~Anna

Coffee Vanilla Bean Cookies

I love to drink coffee and I love vanilla so this should be a win-win cookie. It really is only a win but I do want to write down the recipe in case I ever feel the need to make them again, which is quite possible. They are very tasty. They hold up pretty well too, for storing. I took some four days after I made them to lunch with some lady friends (not kids, although they like them to) of mine and they all thought they were pretty good, so they do keep pretty well.

A few years back I was reading a blog called I am Mommy, I think, and she had a sugar cookie with coffee in it recipe she put up. I finally tried it this winter, but at the time I didn't have a coffee grinder and used pre-ground coffee from a can and we weren't too thrilled with the results so I tossed that recipe. Now this past week when I was messing with both the vanilla beans and putting away our coffee I thought about that recipe and decided I would try it again only now I couldn't find it so I came up with this one. Which was a winner in our book. I hope you like it as well. The basic recipe came from Margaret's Betty Crocker cookbook called Brown Sugar Refrigerator Cookies.This is what you need to make the cookies.

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup white sugar

1 cup butter, softened

1 egg

1 1/2 cup white flour

1 1/2 cup whole wheat flour

I doubled the recipe and used 4 cups whole wheat but I think a little less whole wheat would be better.

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/2 teaspoon vanilla beans

I used vanilla beans that I had already had soaking in vodka for about 1 year so they weren't as powerful. If you are using fresh beans I would say don't use the liquid vanilla. You be the judge though.

To get the beans out of the pod I cut it lengthwise with my kitchen scissors and then used a teaspoon to scrape down the middle and collect the beans that way. It goes real easy.

1/4 cup very finely ground coffee.

We get our coffee beans from Feed My Starving Children and really love the flavor!

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

This is how you make the cookies:

1. In a large bowl, beat brown sugar, butter, vanilla, and egg until nice a creamy. Stir in the remaining ingredients until mixed well.

2. Shape dough into a 1 1/2 inch diameter log on a piece of plastic wrap. Wrap and refrigerate 2-12 hours. I wouldn't go any longer for fear of your coffee getting bitter flavored.

They just need to be cooled until they are firm enough to hold their shape.

3. Heat oven to 375○ F.

4. Unwrap log and slice into 1/4 inch slice. Place on an ungreased cookie sheet. Then I dipped a glass in sugar and flattened each one a little more. Making sure I put plenty of sugar on it to give it a nice sparkly look.

5. Bake for 6-9 minutes or until browned lightly. Cool 1-2 minutes; remove from cookie sheet.

I frosted some of the cookies with a glaze of powdered sugar, vanilla beans and half and half. I thought that added a nice touch but it didn't really affect the flavor. The icing dried hard so it was good for stacking.

Enjoy,

~Anna

P.S. If you don't have a coffee grinder I bet you could get what you need from a coffee shop.

Our Week, so far

This week we have had sweet, surprise visitors around our place. At three months this one is not afraid of strangers and is perfectly happy to give lots of sweet smiles.

Margaret can't take enough pictures of Jaten.

We got to take our first bike ride of the year on Wednesday to play at the park. It was down right hot out on March 31st! Such pleasant weather to be out and about! I made gluten/dairy free rumpledoodles for snacks this week. They turned out quite good although a bit dryer than they would normally be. I used rice and corn for the flour.

The lizard liked seeing the warm sunshine, just like us.

This morning I sent my eldest and Nic off on a ride with Travis at 3:30 am to sneak a ride. I expect them home in a couple hours. I hope they have made fun new memories. It ended up they needed to sit in the car quite awhile waiting for things to get organised in the office so I am hopeful they didn't have too much down time, but with their active imaginations it was probably just fine!

Talk to you later,

~Anna

Rumpledoodles

Have you ever had a Rumpledoodle?

Well, neither had I until a few years ago.

When this young lady watched a Pooh movie and decided we really needed to

try the recipe at the end which they said was Pooh's most favorite food other than Honey.

It turns out that it is one of our favorite cookies, too.

So here, is our recipe for Rumpledoodles!

1 cup rolled oats (I didn't have rolled oats yesterday when I made them and used just plain old oatmeal and they turned out just fine)

1 cup sugar

1 cup flour (I use whole wheat)

1 cup coconut

1/2 cup raisins (I used craisins this time and you couldn't tell any difference from when I use raisins, at least Margaret told people they were raisins and I didn't tell them otherwise because they don't like Craisins in their food very well)

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon cinnamon

2 teaspoon baking soda

Mix all of this together well in a large bowl. Then add

3 tablespoons molasses

1/2 cup oil

3 tablespoons boiling water

1 egg

beaten all together.

Mix all of the ingredients together. The mix will be dry and crumbly but that is the way it is. Don't worry.

Heat your oven to 350*. Place tablespoonfuls of dough onto a greased cookie sheet. You might have to kind of squish the mix together to get it to stay in cookie shapes on the pan.

I did anyways.

Bake them for approximately 10 minutes. Once they are set and getting a little crunchy on the edges is just about a perfect time to remove them from the oven.

Let the cookies cool on the pan for a minute and them remove.

They make an excellent accompaniment to a cup of coffee!

Let me know if your family likes them as much as mine does.

~Anna