The DH was away for the weekend, and to distract myself from missing him I went on a baking frenzy. One of the things I made was this delicious gingersnap cookie recipe! These cookies have real zested ginger in them, and taste dee-lish! They’re also vegan, low-gluten, and free of refined sugars and flours!

What makes these yummy cookies so healthy? Spelt flour! Spelt flour is naturally low in gluten, so if you have gluten issues, this recipe is one for you! Spelt flour isn’t totally gluten-free though, though unfortunately it’s not for those with Celiac disease. Gluten intolerance, though? Bring it on! To avoid refined sugars, I used maple syrup in this recipe, but you could also sub in honey or even regular molasses. Just use less, since honey is such a strong sweetener.

Enough with the recipe discussion, bring on the cookies, you say? I couldn’t agree more! Let’s!

GINGERSNAP COOKIES WITH BITE!

Makes 3 dozen cookies

• 2 1/2 c. spelt flour
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 1/2 tsp. black pepper
• 1/8 tsp. salt
• 1/8 tsp. cayenne pepper
• 1/4 tsp. cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp. nutmeg
• 1/4 tsp. cardamom
• 1/4 tsp. ground cloves
• 3/4 c. maple syrup
• 1/2 c. vegetable oil
• 3 tbsp. blackstrap molasses (extra iron, yo’!)
• 3 tbsp. ginger, zested

Mix all dry ingredients together. Add in wet ingredients and stir. Roll into small balls and place on a silicone baking sheet on a baking tray. Bake at 325 degrees for 12 minutes. Remove to a cooling rack, and let cool. Eat, and enjoy the gingery bite!

Kitchen Hack: Peel your ginger root with a spoon (use the spoon as a knife — seriously, it works) then freeze it whole. When you need some fresh ginger, take your chunk of frozen ginger and rub it on a zester to get a very fine ginger zest! Great to use in stir-fries, as the ginger almost melts away! Also fabulous in that you never waste your ginger (ever find fresh ginger molding away in the fridge?) as you only grate the amount you need before returning the frozen ginger to the freezer.

These cookies freeze well, so you can make them in advance and just thaw them when you need them. I’ve packed away almost the entire batch into the freezer for future lunches (*cough*midnight snacks*cough*). I plan to enjoy them with a nice cup of tea! Oooh, or a nice cold glass of milk!

Next Post: Either the Apple Cinnamon Pancakes I keep promising, or…a cheesecake recipe that doesn’t use cream cheese! I still need to experiment a bit more with that recipe, so stay tuned!  

Linking Up at Meal Plan Monday! And at Full Plate Thursday!

I belong to some baking groups on facebook and every now and then I see bakers using food markers to draw on cakes and cookies. It looked like so much fun that I had to try it myself! It’s much easier than you think and just as therapeutic as adult colouring books in my opinion — plus, you can EAT your colouring! What’s not to love?

I’m going to take you through the steps of making, icing, and decorating cookies that are good enough to sell, great for gifts, and (obviously) delicious to eat!

Step 1: BAKE YOUR COOKIES

Make your cookie dough. I used this: Lilaloa’s Vanilla 2.0 recipe, as it’s a fail-proof recipe that I recommend to all my friends (and that includes you all)! Roll out the dough, and cut using your favourite cookie cutters. I used my “Fun Bites” cookie cutter. Easy to use, and it really does make for fun bites! Bake cookies until the bottoms are golden, and let cool.

Step 2: MAKE YOUR ICING

While the cookies are cooling, make your icing. Royal icing is the white sauce of the cookie world — versatile and the most important basic recipe to master. I used this recipe. The recipe will give you a stiff icing, and more than you need. That’s ok! You can store the rest in the fridge, in a plastic container, covered with a layer of plastic wrap under the lid.

Step 3: ICING THE COOKIES

Spreadable Icing vs. Piping Icing

So, you start with the stiff icing. This is spreadable consistency. Take a 1/2 c. of the icing, and mix in a teaspoon of water. Now, you’ve got icing that can be piped, but won’t run off the sides of the cookies. (Professional cookiers talk about 6-second icing, 12-second icing, etc., referring to how long it takes for the icing to spread out. It can take a lot of work to get to that level of expertise, and unless you’re making a living from selling cookies, it’s not worth all the practice it takes to get to that level. What I will show you, is good enough to get compliments and oohs and ahhhs from your friends and family — and which home cook doesn’t love that?)

Take your pipeable icing, and place it in a Ziploc bag, in a corner. Twist the top until you’ve essentially made yourself a cheapie piping bag. Cut the tiniest bit off the bottom tip of the bag. Now you can ice an outline! I outlined the squares on my cookies.

Fill-In Icing

Now that you’ve got your icing outlines piping, take another 1/2 cup of your spreadable icing, and add in 2 teaspoons of water. This will make for a looser icing than your piping icing. Place in another Ziploc baggie/icing bag, cut the tip off the bag, and squeeze some icing in the centre of the outlines. You will see this icing spread out in a few seconds. Resist the urge to fill in the outline with lots of icing (or else you’ll get icing running over the sides of the outline) and don’t try to spread out the icing (it will spread out by itself in a few seconds).

Step 4: DRY YOUR ICING

At this point, you need to let your iced cookies dry before you can draw on them. Professional cookiers use dehydrators to get the icing on the cookies to be glossy. It’s a small difference, but a) makes your cookies look that much more polished and b) you get to draw on them faster! (A huge plus for someone like me who hates boring stuff like watching cookies dry, but loves the fun stuff like drawing on them.)

Put your cookies on dehydrator trays in your dehydrator. The catch is, it has to be a top-down or back-front dehydrator. In other words, the fan has to be on the top, blowing wind down onto the icing on the tops of the cookies, or in the back blowing to the front of the cookies. If you have a dehydrator that blows from the bottom up, you’re going to dry out your cookies instead of making the icing shiny. But….there’s a hack for that!

Kitchen Hack: Don’t have one of the more expensive dehydrators that blow back to front (like the Excalibur models) or top down? No worries, I have the Margaret-tested solution for you! Hack your bottom-up dehydrator! Put your cookies on your dehydrator trays. Place those trays on the counter. Place an empty tray on top of your cookie-filled tray. Then turn the base of your dehydrator upside down and place on top of the empty tray. Yes, it’s a tad wobbly, and you’ll have to keep an eye on it, but it dries those cookies to a glossy finish in under an hour!!!

Step 4: GO CRAZY WITH THE FOOD MARKERS!

Once your cookies are dry (you can test this by pressing down with your finger gently on the icing — but be sure to do this on a test cookie), you can draw on them! To be honest, I got tired of piping outlines and filling them in, so I just piping some fill-in icing in blobs in the centre of my cookies and let them spread out into circles. Once dried they were the perfect smiley face template!

I drew on my white circle cookies with a yellow food marker and let that dry for a minute. Then I drew the faces on top!

Emoticon cookies — the perfect way to eat your feelings!

What sort of cookies will you create? Let me know in the comments! I think these cookies would be great to play around with. You could write love messages to the spouse, have the kids draw edible art to give as gifts to the grands, or just have some edible art therapy for yourself!

Food + art…a tasty combo!

Next Post: Hmm. Probably the Apple Cinnamon Pancakes I keep talking about!

Linking Up at Happiness is Homemade! And Full Plate Thursday!

I don’t usually publish two posts one day after the other, but I made some shortbread today and it was too good not to share right away! My mom is turning 70 this week, and we’re having a celebration. I planned to bake a cake and asked her what cake she would like. Turns out, she’d rather have shortbread! Fine by me, so I researched some shortbread recipes and tried a few out.

First I made traditional Scottish shortbread from a recipe given to me an online friend, and then decided I’d like to supplement that with a whipped shortbread. Traditional shortbread is a sturdy and solid cookie, fyi, and whipped shortbread is made of super-fluffy dough and ends up being an airy and crumbly cookie. Technically both are shortbread, but they’re very different beasts!

I came up with this whipped shortbread recipe because I had some dark chocolate I wanted to bake with, and because I know that corn starch is often the secret ingredient to make a nicely crumbly shortbread. It’s best to use icing sugar in this recipe, as regular sugar is too grainy to give that melt-in-your-mouth effect. And, whipping your butter and then whipping your dough, gives this cookie a super-light airiness that’s just perfect for an afternoon tea.

So! Let’s make us some shortbread, shall we?

Dark Chocolate Chunk Whipped Shortbread

• 1 1/2 – 1 3/4 c. flour
• 1 tbsp. corn starch
• 1/2 cup icing sugar 
• 1 c. butter, soft
• 1 pinch salt
• 1 dark chocolate bar (I used Lindt 80% cocoa), chopped

Beat butter until fluffy and lighter in colour (the butter lightens in colour due to the addition of air via the beating).

Add in other ingredients (except for chocolate chunks) and beat dough for 5-10 minutes. Will be super-duper fluffy (like, woah, fluffy!), and the dough will lighten up in colour. 

Stir in chocolate chunks.

Drop in rounded spoonfuls onto an ungreased cookie sheet (ungreased because these cookies have enough fat in them already! I used a silicon baking sheet to make clean-up easier). FYI, the cookies will flatten out as they bake, so you do need to have the dough in large rounds on the cookie sheet.

Bake for 12-15 minutes in a 350 degree oven, or until the edges of the cookies are brown.

Let cool for a minute in the pan, then remove to cooling rack to cool completely.

And one last note, if you like sturdier shortbread, add in more flour and/or omit the corn starch. You do you, boo!

These are super-fluffy shortbread and will totally melt in your mouth. Plus, the combo of dark chocolate and buttery crumbliness is just too good! My mom loved them (and so did the rest of my family, including the chocolate-abhorring DH), so I’m sure you’ll love them too! Just…don’t make them if you’re trying to watch your weight, because they are way too good to only eat one. (I may have eaten four. Or five. Eh, you only live once, right?)

Next Post: Three-Ingredient Blue Cheese Pasta! An easy, yet fancy-pants weekday dinner, for when you want gourmet food in the time it takes to order fast food. Stay tuned!

Linking Up at Meal Plan Monday and at Happiness is Homemade!