Molasses Cookies with Hazelnuts and Cranberries
Developing these molasses cookies solved a mystery that’s been haunting my mom and me for twenty years.
The recipe
Yield: 6 dozen small cookies
Time: 2 hours
Ingredients
2 ¼ c (280 g) all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp ground ginger
¼ tsp nutmeg
¼ tsp salt
2 sticks (16 tbsp or 230 g) salted butter, at room temperature
½ c (110 g) sugar
½ c (110 g) dark brown sugar
⅓ c (110 g) molasses
2 eggs
2 tsp (14 g) vanilla extract
⅔ c (216 g) hazelnuts, roasted and roughly chopped
⅔ c (216 g) dried cranberries
Instructions
1. Preheat your oven to 350°F and put one rack in the lower third of the oven and one rack in the upper third. Line two cookie sheets with parchment paper and set aside.
2. Add the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and salt to a medium bowl and whisk until combined. Set aside.
3. Put the butter and sugars in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Beat on medium speed until fluffy and a few shades paler in color, 3–5 minutes. Scrape down the bowl once or twice.
4. Add half the flour mixture, the molasses, eggs, and vanilla. Mix on low speed until combined.
5. Add the other half of the flour mixture and mix on low speed just until the dough is no longer streaky.
6. Add the hazelnuts and cranberries and mix on low speed just until evenly distributed.
7. Using a 1-tablespoon scoop, drop the dough onto the parchment-lined cookie sheets, spaced about 2 inches apart. (I fit 12 cookies on a standard cookie sheet.)
8. Bake for 7–9 minutes, swapping racks halfway through, until the cookies are dark brown at the edges.
9. Take the cookies out of the oven and leave them to cool on the sheets for 5 minutes. After the 5 minutes are up, transfer to a wire rack.
10. Store the cookies at room temperature for a few days, or freeze them. They freeze really well!
Notes and tips
I use regular molasses. Choose this over dark molasses or blackstrap molasses. Both have a stronger, bitter flavor.
I roast my hazelnuts for maximum flavor. Set your oven to 300°F, put the nuts on a baking sheet, and roast 15–20 minutes or until they’re golden, shaking the tray a few times during baking.
Check out the notes section in the Chocolate Chip and Crunchy Caramel Cookies for my soapbox on room temperature butter and how to cream it properly.
Like I said in the last recipe, every kitchen setup is different, so bake a single test cookie before you do two whole trays at once. If the test cookie is very flat after it cools, add ¼ c (30 g) flour to the dough. If it doesn’t spread much at all, add 2 tbsp melted butter. Keep testing until it comes out right, then bake your full batch. You’ll thank me later.
The story
My mom is the Queen of Cookies. Every year for Christmas, she bakes at least a dozen different varieties of cookies over the course of just two days. She fills an entire chest freezer full of them, and every time she’s invited to a Christmas party, she brings a platterful. She’s perfected every kind of cookie you can think of, and some you’ve never heard of before. She loads up her legendary platters with slice-and-bake sugar cookies topped with rainbows of glittering sugar. There are Dutch almond paste–filled cookies, made from an old family recipe. There are hot cocoa cookies complete with mini marshmallows. Snickerdoodles are coated with cinnamon sugar. Chocolate cookies are so dark and rich they’re almost black. There are cookies made from red and white dough twisted to look like candy canes. Maple cookies are artfully drizzled with glaze. They all taste as good as they look. That is, except the chocolate chip ones.
My mom always used the Nestle Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe, and at some point during my childhood, they started coming out flat. They would spread so much in the oven that they came out looking like puddles, and the chocolate chips stuck up like mountains in a lake. Compared to my mom’s other cookies, these were downright ugly. Every time they flopped on her, she’d sigh. “They’re going to look so ugly on my cookie platters.” I protested: “They taste delicious, Mom! You can’t stop baking them.”
She didn’t stop. She tried everything to get these cookies to work. She experimented with cold and warm butter, with chilling the dough, with different types of baking sheets—all to no avail. I even took a crack at it, and when neither of us could get the cookies to work, we gave up and turned them into bars instead.
But this year, I cracked the code. The strange part was that I didn’t do it while developing the chocolate chip cookies for the last post—it was while making these molasses cookies that I had my eureka moment. I wasn’t even trying. The idea for these cookies was to take the classic molasses cookie, which I love, and make it my own by adding dried cranberries and hazelnuts to amp up the Christmas flavors.
The first test batch turned out well. I loved the toasty crunch and chewy acidity the hazelnuts and cranberries brought to a normally sweet, simple cookie. But BC, my husband, thought they could be better. He wanted more hazelnuts, some crunch in every bite.
I doubled the hazelnuts, then doubled the cranberries as well to keep the flavors balanced. The cookies, which had spread perfectly the first time, came out of the oven looking like little round balls. They hadn’t expanded at all while baking and were unpleasantly dense and cakey. The nuts and dried fruit provided a lot more structure to the dough than I’d expected. I kept reducing the flour in each successive batch to get the spread right, and I ended up removing lot—almost a cup total—until I had a cookie that expanded in the oven but wasn’t a molasses pancake.
As I was adjusting my flour ratio, it dawned on me that my mom and I had always omitted the 1 cup of walnuts the Toll House recipe called for. The recipe says the walnuts are optional, and calls for adding 2 tbsp flour to the dough if you do leave them out. But that couldn’t be true. Based on my molasses cookie experiement, it would have to be more like ½ cup of extra flour.
My mom and I have long since moved on to other chocolate chip recipes. She’s found one that rises beautifully and does her platters proud, and I developed my own this Christmas. Now that we know what went wrong, though, who knows! Maybe we’ll give the Toll House recipe another shot.
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