Orange Ginger Cookies
I baked over one hundred fifty cookies to get this recipe right.
The recipe
Yield: about 3 dozen
Time: 1 ½–2 hours
Ingredients
1 stick (½ c or 112 g) salted butter at room temperature
¾ c (190 g) light brown sugar
⅛ c (40 g) molasses
1 egg
2 c (250 g) flour
1 tsp ground ginger
½ tsp salt
½ tsp baking soda
⅔–1 c (100–150 g) candied orange, chopped into chocolate chip–sized pieces
⅓ c (50 g) candied ginger, chopped to mini chocolate chip–sized pieces
Instructions
1. Preheat your oven to 350°F. Set one rack in the top third of the oven and one rack in the lower third of the oven. Prep two cookie sheets by lining them with parchment paper.
2. Beat the butter on medium speed in a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment until it is soft and fluffy.
3. Add the sugar and molasses to the butter and mix on medium speed until very well combined. Add the egg and mix again on low speed until well incorporated. If the mixture starts to separate, that’s okay. It will come back together once the dry ingredients are added.
4. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, ground ginger, salt, and baking soda and mix to combine. Pour the dry ingredients into the mixer and mix on low speed until just combined and all the flour is incorporated.
5. Pour in the chopped orange and ginger and mix on low speed until they are well distributed.
6. Using a small cookie scoop, drop 1 tbsp–sized balls of dough onto your cookie sheets, leaving 3 inches between them. Bake for 7–9 minutes or until the cookies are golden brown at the edges, swapping racks halfway through the bake time.
7. Remove the cookies from the oven and let them cool for 5 minutes on the cookie sheets. After that, use a thin spatula to move them to wire racks to finish cooling.
Notes and tips
I used Trader Joe’s crystallized candied ginger and Trader Joe’s sweetened dried orange slices for this recipe. If you use the larger amount of orange, that’s one whole package.
Many people swear by Silpat or AirBake cookie sheets because they keep the bottoms of their cookies from burning and delay browning, but I recommend a regular cookie sheet for this recipe. This dough is soft, so the cookies will spread too much on Silpat or AirBake sheets because they may not get enough heat on the bottoms to set them.
One note about parchment: it tends to slip off the cookie sheets if you don’t hold them level, so be careful when moving the sheets in and out of the oven! I lost a few cookies from my final batch this way and it was sad.
The cooling time on the sheets is vital. It gives the cookies time to finish baking and for the bottoms to set. The 5-minute rule is a good one for most cookie recips. If they aren’t set by then, they were probably underbaked, so put the next batch in for an extra minute or two.
If not all of your cookies fit on two cookie sheets, you don’t even need to cool off the pans or replace the parchment paper for the second batch. Just scoop the dough directly onto the old parchment and bake them for the same amount of time as the first batch.
If you eat these cookies the day you bake them, they will be a little crunchy on the edges and soft and chewy in the middle. If you’re not going to eat all of them in the same day, keep them in an airtight container at room temp. They’ll be soft and chewy but still delicious. And like most cookies, they freeze well in an airtight container.
The story
I didn’t mean to bake so many; it just sort of happened. The cookies from my original test recipe came out flat, so I baked a second batch with more flour, but I overcompensated and they didn’t spread at all in the oven. I thought the third time would be the charm, and the original batch hadn’t made that many cookies (2 dozen small ones), so the third batch was double the amount of dough. Except the first tray of cookies was too dry, which meant I had to add more butter. And then the second tray was too flat, meaning I’d added too much butter, so I had to add more flour, and by the time they were close to right, I had baked five dozen cookies in one long afternoon. I also had leftovers from my more modest 2-dozen batch the day before, and I still hadn’t arrived at orange-ginger cookie perfection. It took more tries and some careful adjusting of the amount of flour in the dough, but I finally did achieve what I’d set out to: a ginger-flavored version of a chocolate chip cookie but with chunks of orange instead of chips, chewy in the middle and crispy on the edges when fresh.
The bonus is I now know more about cookies than I ever wanted to in my life, and you don’t have to learn the hard way. If you bake the first batch in a recipe and it isn’t working like you’d hoped, try the following fixes, but after each addition to your dough, test bake a single cookie, let it cool completely, and taste it before adding more of anything (overcompensating because of impatience was my fatal mistake!).
If your cookies spread too much in the oven and are too thin and gooey in the middle, there is not enough flour. Add more a quarter cup at a time. If your cookies don’t spread much at all and are dry, add some melted butter to the dough, a few tablespoons at a time. If your cookies are cakey in texture and dry instead of chewy, they have too many eggs in them. I was not able to fix this on the fly, but next time you try the recipe, decrease the number of eggs by 1 or use just an egg yolk for the second egg instead of a whole one. (Beware; these fixes are the way to more cookies than you wanted, but 30 pretty good cookies are better than 20 mediocre ones in my opinion.)
Shameful typo
I used to be a proofreader, so this is embarrassing. In the chai latte cake recipe, I got the weight measurement wrong for the sugar in the frosting. The volume measure is correct. The weight should read “230 g” instead of “430 g.” The page on the website and the PDF have been corrected.
Spread the love
If you like this recipe, please recommend Confessions of a Cake Snob to someone you know. Share this newsletter with a friend, comment on the website, or bake it and let me know how it went for you. Email me with comments, things you’d like to see, and suggestions at confessionsofacakesnob@substack.com. I’m excited to hear from you!
And after batch 15 I was still not sick of them!