Friday, December 16, 2011

Gingerbread Cookies

I may be the only person who likes gingerbread cookies. They're always the last to go on the cookie plate, but I think they’re cute as shit, and I love the flavor and texture. I also think the dough is a bit easier to work with than sugar cookies; the molasses makes it a little pliable when cold. I love the way white icing pops against the rich brown. I feel that unless you’re only doing cutout cookies, you should stick to one shape, or two. Unless you’re decorating cookies with kids, but in that case nothing I have to say is going to help you, really… your cookies are going to look amateurish. At best. (granted, if my mom was half as much of an asshole as I am, she would not have been able to stand making cookies with a 5 year old, and then where would I be?)

I’ve been using this Fine Cooking recipe since it came out in 2005 and I’ve always really liked the results. But this year, their stupid site kept pushing this new recipe- basically the same, but with 1/3 the amount of butter! And after seeing that so many times I started questioning… So, I split the difference this year- the dough came together and rolled out easily, but I thought the cookies weren’t nearly as chewy and soft as previous years. Why didn’t I just stick with the old recipe? More butter is always a good choice!

It is SO IMPORTANT to flour the hell out of the surface you roll out on. As long as you don’t actually incorporate all that flour into it, it won’t mess up the cookie. The temperature of the dough when you roll it out is also really important, too cold and it will crack, too warm and it will stick to everything, and when you go to move your cutout to the sheet, you’ll stretch and bend it and it will look like an 8 year old made it.

Roll out relatively small amounts so that you can learn from each try how much time to let it sit at room temperature, how quickly you need to work to not lose the structural integrity of the dough. It is also totally acceptable to roll out dough on waxed paper or a pastry cloth. This has a few advantages but the primary on is that once you’ve got your perfectly even smooth sheet of dough, you can stick that whole thing in the fridge to get the temperature (and by extension, the elasticity/flow) that you want. As long as it’s totally flat, and you have enough room in your fridge for things like this. (I think the recipe says to roll out to 1/8 inch, but I think closer to ¼ inch is nicer.)

Speaking of that, once you’ve got your perfectly smooth, sharp-edged cutouts spaced on your parchment lined baking sheet (it has to be parchment and it has to be a cookie appropriate sheet- no rimmed sides, not a jelly roll pan. Never a jelly roll pan.), the next step is one that hardly anyone does, but it is SO IMPORTANT YOU GUYS. Put that whole sheet of gorgeous cookies in the fridge for like 15 minutes. This really sets the shape of the cookie so they don’t spread. The butter in the cookie goes back the cold, hard, right-out-of-the-fridge unyielding butter. Don’t try to fuck with them or move them around at this point because you will break them. You’re going to want to… I mean, they look so perfect, except for that one little guy with the arm bent the wrong way, and maybe I could just move it… Oh my god, you broke it, it’s ruined. What did I just say? There’s nothing more you can do from this point on. Put those fuckers in the oven.

Now, if you’re a crazy person, and if you’re still reading this you might be, you could put a little scrap of dough from your cutouts, one that’s the same thickness as your cookies, on the sheet to be the test piece. If you think there is a possibility they might be done, grab that piece with a spatula, let it cool like 30 seconds and play with it a bit. It should be soft, but when you break it apart it should have some grain to it… it will look wet, but not like dough. Take the cookies out right now and slide them off their sheets. (If you were to poke one of the cookies now, it would leave an indentation and stay there, so you’re not going to do that, are you? If they feel cookie-like in consistency immediately out of the oven, they’re overcooked. They will make an unpleasant crunching noise when your friends and family try to bite into them, and that noise will haunt your dreams) You can put them on a rack if you want, but I would do so by sliding the whole piece of parchment onto it- I would rather not move them until they’re somewhat cool. And the parchment is not going to prevent them from cooling, it’s not much of an insulator.

Don’t try to decorate them with icing until they’re totally cool, obviously. I also think you should wait until all the baking is done, maybe save that for another day. You are not at your best right now. Maybe you should have a glass of wine first. Icing a cookie is such a different skill set than baking and it’s not something you can multitask on, or you’ll forget about the next round of cookies in the oven and that would be heartbreaking. I’m not going to get into icing techniques because I’m actually really bad at it, but I would just ask that you exercise restraint. Brightly colored icing and glittery add-ons are a cheap trick to distract from shoddy cookie technique, and you’re better than that.

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